


Apprentice

by WaltzQueen



Series: Apprenticeship [3]
Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Arson, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Rebirth, Temporary Amnesia, Temporary Character Death, fashionborne, it's the name of the game, non graphic child death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-12
Updated: 2017-06-10
Packaged: 2018-08-14 18:22:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 27,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8024293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WaltzQueen/pseuds/WaltzQueen
Summary: Gehrman receives a new apprentice.This means more than you might think it does.





	1. Apprentice

**Author's Note:**

> Lovecraft's horror came from Otherness. The idea that something was so alien and unwelcome that you could not comprehend it. Now, Lovecraft was racist as fuck and was mostly talking about Africans, but the Unknown is one of the best sources of horror. Want something to be scary? Make it Unknown or Other.
> 
> People pretend we're not scared of the Other, but that's a load of hogwash. We have been, we are, we will be. The Other is dangerous. The Other is unknowable and thusly Unknown. The Other is Scary. Why is this important? That's simple.
> 
> In Bloodborne you ARE the Other.
> 
> If Yharnham is 1800s cthulu-pocalypse werewolf infested London, what's more Other than a culture they are doing their best to squash? What's more other than something THAT culture finds Other? What's more Other than Priyahnka Kapoor?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gehrman receives a new apprentice.  
> it goes about as well as you'd expect

Priyahnka is born.

Just like everyone else.

She is born cold and still, with a cord wrapped around her neck.

Priyahnka is born. Just like everyone else.

She takes her first steps at two years old. Her first word is "gross." Her mother laughs at it.

She doesn't recall ever knowing her father and her mother was only there for such a short time she is more of a shape than a person. Priyahnka wonders, at six years old, if her mother loved her. She hopes her mother would have wrapped her arms around her and told her stories. She could have been cruel and demanding and angry every moment of Priyahnka's life. Either way Priyahnka's sure that even if her mother was alive she would love the sea. Even with parental love Pryahnka would love the sea and the way it glows. It only bears a passing thought as she closes the door of the house alone on the coast. She does not see the people armed with anger and disgust as much as they are armed with fire come up to her house.

Priyahnka is born. She takes her first step at a year and three months. Her first word is "gross." Her mother cries at it.

She brings disgust everywhere she goes. Hisses come out of the mouths of shadows and out of closed doors and menacing walls. "Dalit" they cry. She is a burden on a worn mother. Adrika Kapoor, she tells Priyahnka, is what she was called. Priyahnka asks why the villagers that live away from them call her "Parayiar." When she asks again her mother only sighs and refuses to shed tears apparent in her eyes. Her mother is tired and always hungry. She knows they cannot afford to use energy crying or being sad so Priyahnka does not ask again.

Priyahnka is old enough to understand the answers to her questions when her mother collapses and the doctors will not touch her. They weep, both for different reasons, as Priyahnka Kapoor and Adrika Kapoor, kneel and lie prone on the sand by the sea. They stay there, staring out at the open water as the sun gives its last gasp and dies on the horizon.

She is quite aware that no villager will speak with her. Not here where they know who and what she is. She gathers what she can hold and leaves this small house on the sand and the sea that holds her mother. They did not have much, but Priyahnka prays as she steps over the threshold with what little they possessed,that she will find purpose elsewhere, for here she cannot stomach staying. The stars shudder over head. They are silent vigils to her trek under the watchful eye of the moon.

She travels a long time before she finds him. The moonlight has softened her somewhat. Which makes it only more surprising when the door of the freight train compartment she has snuck onto is flung open wide. He stands in the sunlight, imposing and stern faced and pale as though he was made of milk and moonlight. He steps into the compartment and floods it with the smell of Kantakari Flowers. All at once she begins to sweat in fear as he takes a deep breath and turns right towards her.

He steps nearer and nearer until he is looming over her. His eyes glint as he looks down on her. She is only twelve and a woman as young as her is a tasty bit of meat for some of the men she has met on the moonlit roads. She had always been meeting them blow for blow or stealthily with poisonous things. Priyahnka had been prepared. There was no preparation here, only a man taller than the ceiling and her, dripping fear wrapped around an iron will to live.

He pauses looks down at her as the minute stretches. His hand reaches into his pocket and he pulls out bread. Of all things he pulls out bread and extends it towards her. Priyahnka reaches up slowly before snatching the bread out of his open palm almost faster than he can see. Her eyes still locked firmly onto him she eats. He smiles distantly and softly but the glint in his eyes is not gone. It is just hiding, she can tell. She reaches into her meager belongings and draws forth a small cloth wrapped jar. She pulls the loose covering off and tips its contents into her hand. She offers this stranger with pale skin six Kantakari berries in repayment. He takes them slowly. He considers the berries for a long time before smiling and tucking them away in another pocket.

Priyahnka stands while his attention is occupied. When he looks back at her, she is looking him in the eye. Hands pressed palm to palm and fingers skyward, she bows slightly and says "namaste." When he does not respond she tries again.

"Namaste." His voice is deep and grainy as though he was swallowed sand. He does not press his hands together but it is not necessary. She is glad of meeting him here, although she was not fond of the manner in which it happened. The man reaches his hand out towards her again. Priyahnka dodges to her right. The man continues reaching to the left as though he hadn't seen her scurry. Priyahnka refuses to be the slightest bit embarrassed when he grabs a hold of the large wooden trunk instead of attempting to grab her. She is aware that many have tried for her like careless children ripping flowers from the soil but she has pricked many and will always be sure to prick them as best she can.

As he leaves, Priyahnka follows him. She knows that she draws stares as she follows him ,barefooted, from the station. All the men and women here look like him. They all have skin like the eyes of the dead, pale and cold. She doesn't much care. Priyahnka has been the recipient of precious little kindness in her life and she will repay his kindness with kindness of her own. She cannot carry his trunk. It it many times her size and while he carries it hefted onto his shoulder she knows she wouldn't be able to lift it. Despite this she will help him greatly one day. Until then she will follow him, lying in wait for her opportunity because this is where fate had led her.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Priyahnka has only been in in Yharnam for a few months when she sees a beast in the night.

As she slowly learned the language of her new town she learned about the town itself. Yharnham was the home of the Healing Church. An illustrious church that came from the nearby College of Byrgenwryth. The wove miracles with blood and could cure any illness. Many came to Yharnham to be cured although some did not make it in time. The man she had followed and would later know as Gascoigne eventually asked what disease she had that she would be coming to Yharnham to cure. When she told him she had no such disease he admitted he had mistaken her for such a traveler. Priyahnka was very impressed with his town and its abilities, how proud he must have been to grow up in it. She told him as much. Gascoigne chuckled and told her that he was as foreign to this place as she was. She thought of how well he matched everyone else in the city and laughed.

The months had turned the seasons to summer when Priyahnka stalked out of Mister Gascoigne's house and away from the hearth she tended and slept by. A dream had awoken her. It had disturbed her badly enough that, although all she could recall was the hush of the sea, she felt unsettled upon waking and decided to walk the streets in search of peace of mind. Whores called at her as she paced the cold hard streets. Some of them were not much older than her but they bore themselves so that all of them seemed as though they had been skulking around in the night since the night had been created.

Regardless of the time of night she had little business with them and continued her journey. As Priyahnka walked on the night walkers tapered off. She was soon alone but for the full moon and the low calls of birds in rooftops. She was not far into Old Yharnham but something in the night felt dangerous. Priyahnka had barely decided to turn back when a door burst open, spewing a creature and a vicious howl into the night. At first it appeared no more than a horribly misshapen dog, lying there all curled up on the cobbled streets. Light from inside fell over the deformed creature like a funral pall. Then it turned its face to her.

Priyahnka's voice died in her throat when the grocer turned his face to her. It was the man who sold Gascoigne vegetables (or rather sold them to her so she could bring them to him). His jaw hung loose with an onion wedged between his teeth. His peculiar glasses were still hooked around his ears but the lenses where smashed and the thin wires twisted. Glass cut into him across his pallid cheeks. She recognized that face but the face was all she could recognize. His body had twisted into something wicked. Hair came out of every rip in his clothing and his hands were longer than anyone's should ever be. From here she could see blood on them, more blood than could have come from his face. His legs curled up like dog's legs as they began kicking and scrambling to find purchase.

She stood still as a tree and absolutely frozen in shock. The grocer wailed thinly, as though breathing hurt too much for him to gather enough air to do it properly. Slowly he raised himself up off the ground and began staggering towards her. Priyahnka took a sharp knife out of its hiding place, hidden at the base of her neck in her hair, but just watching him move she knew she would have very little chance. She waited until he reached his hands, grotesque and enlongated, outwards to snatch her by her sari or long hair before she ran at him. She swung wide at the foul thing but it reacted too quick and flung its arm out and smacked her away. The knife clattered as it hit the ground too far away for her to reach it. She could only look up at the beast coming towards her, onion still in its teeth, and feel remorse that she hadn't done enough for Mister Gascoigne yet.

A bird dropped form the sky. At least it seemed like a great bird, swooping down to catch its prey in its claws. But it was no more a bird than the grocer was a dog. What seemed like a great bird was a man with a long cloak lined in red. He lashed out at the grocer, who turned to him and snarled. The beast leapt at the strange man and missed entirely as the stranger was suddenly four feet away from where he had been standing before. The beast paused only a moment in confusion but that was all the time the stranger needed to lop off its head.

In less than a minute she had lost her mother's only knife, been on the loosing side of a fight for the first time in her life and been covered in blood all down her front. Priyahnka slowly stood as the man began cleaning off his odd blade on the wiry hair of the beast that still bleed sluggishly on the streets. Where there had been dread and mourning before, Priyahnka was suddenly filled with joyous relief and crushing anger. How could she let such a thing happen to herself? What would happen to Mister Gascoigne with no one to cook for him and no marriage prospects if she died? How dare this thing make her lose her mother's knife?

Silence had fallen back over the street. The blood on her began turning sticky as it cooled. Somehow the man was still there in the light, only now he was sheathing his blade and seemed to be preparing to leave. All at once the rage did not seem important and Priyahnka had to be practical. She ran over to the head of the beast and plucked the onion from beneath its jaws. She peeled away a few layers until any evidence of it being bitten was reduced down to two rectangular indents along the surface of it. Turning to look at the head of the beast, she gave it a good hard stomp. She almost kicked it down the street, but decided that looking for it would be too much trouble.

Priyahnka gripped the head by its hair and walked towards the bladed stranger. Hearing her approach, he turned towards her, hand on the blade at his hip. "Namaste" she said, quietly, but no less solidly. His hand did not fall from his blade.

She held up the beast head so that he could see it. His eyes narrowed in consideration. "Teach me."

The stranger smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The sea glowing is a phenomenon that is said to happen in Lakshadweep, in India. That is where Priyahnka is born.  
> Gascoigne fills the train car with the smell of flowers because throughout the course of bloodborne people seem to be able to tell that you are a hunter by the way you smell. Hunters probably carry the smell of the flowers from the dream with them into the waking world. I've chosen to interpret these as Kantakari flowers, so he smells like them despite the fact that he is not a hunter yet.
> 
> Culture notes:  
> South indian people sometimes have up to three different names.  
> Kapoor is a family name meaning born of the moon.  
> Adrika is a name meaning Celestial.  
> paraiyar is a family name for those on the lowest end of the caste system and considered untouchable and disgusting. they lived away from main villages.it is the source of the term pariah. A similar term I included is Dalit.  
> Priyanhka(priyanka) means lovable or kantakari (a south indian flower with many uses for almost all of its parts. it grow low to the ground and is sometimes white, like the flowers of the dream)  
> Priyahnka is going to put that onion under Gascoigne's pillow so he can dream of the person he should marry.It is an old superstition that works with knives as well as onions.  
> Namaste is a greeting done by putting palms together with fingers up and thumbs close to your body and bowing slightly. it refers to the action and the word. One being said/done without the other is fine.


	2. Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a snippet of daily life in yharnham

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mild rewrite of Kill the Competition

"Stand up right," Master Gehrman snaps. Priyahnka scowls furiously  but rushes to obey his orders nonetheless.  Her heels click together with a meaty sound. The ground beneath her is a soothing cool through the thin, flat leather of her shoes. Priyahnka pulls her shoulders back and her eyes set themselves dead ahead. Priyahnka pays no heed to the sweat stinging her eyes. She only stares ahead at the moonlit earth ahead. Her scraped fists clench and unclench as she breathes deeply and silently like a thing on the sedge of sleep. Gehrman walks slowly around her like a hungry dog waiting for a scrap to drop.  She can feel her braided hair settling in the collar of her rough hewn shirt as Gehrman circles around her. Priyahnka cant look; but more than that she WON'T look. She stands as still as the grave.  
  
Priyahnka sways a bit as Master Gehrman's sudden strike connects. It is not painful enough to be sparring practice but not a lighter blow, this hit was punishment. "Stop clenching your arms like that Girl." That is his name for her, Girl. Priyahnka wonders if Maria, her teacher's former pupil, had to earn her own name or if she got it naturally on account of her looking so faded. The more faded Yharnhamites were the better the things they had, like food and jobs and names. She lets her arms go loose at her sides.  
  
Priyahnka recovers swiftly, almost like she was never struck. He jingles around her with his  brass and silver buttons clanking against his blunderbuss. She can feel her ankles readying to propel her into flight but restrains them. Patience...patience....all things must come in time is what Henryk says to her sometimes. She still finds it difficult to wait without something to do.

  
At last, at endless last, Gehrman ceases his exacting scan of her form and leaves off his circling. Priyahnka does not relax, she's learned better than that. Gehrman  glides across the ground as smooth as shadow until he stands in the beaten down dirt of an empty field. She had heard from Gratia that there used to be a forge there, but that something had knocked it down. Gratia had muttered something about the Choir members afterwards, but hadn't been too keen on sharing whatever it was. Priyahnka didn't much care.  
  
She didn't care about it. Still didn't explain why nothing grew there.  
  
"Girl!" Gehrman calls from the far end, where grasses and weeds looking in on the clearing with  hopes of colonizing stand. Priyahnka moves, now. Her pent up tension rips out of her. She is not silent, but she is fast. The caped leather overshirt flattens itself against her chest as she goes. The wind lifts some of the heat out of her sweat damped hair. Not much but some. She was improving greatly every with every hunt and soon she would nearly as fast as Master Gehrman. This speed is probably the only thing keeping her in Gehrman's good graces some days.  
  
Her arms refuse to strengthen anywhere as quickly as her strides quicken. He trains what he can and wrings what excellence he can from her diminutive form but a castle cannot be made from cotton any more than she could wield some of the things the hunters she sees in passing fighting with. Djura alone was a perfect example. Wielding a heavy beast cutter like he was born with it in his hand. Even his newly acquired Stake Driver exploded with force. Gratia couldn't fire a gun to save her literal life but she sure could beat anything, man or beast, into submission. Eudora, clever and proud, wielded a crazy contraption that spun and buzzed like a swarm of disturbed bees. Priyahnka had tried picking it up once while Eudora  off doing other things and had found it to be at least half her own weight if not more. Priyahnka, in comparison, stayed wiry  and tensile but ungainly with the stronger heavier weapons. Only a fair amount of dexterity made the Saif passable in her hands.  
  
Master Gehrman gives her a rare approving glance as he considers the trail of dust and earth still hanging in the air behind her as she comes to a stop. His eyes come back to her with the sharpness of a whipcrack.  
  
"Twice about, then. and twice the other way." he instructs. "Five times." It has a welcome air of finality to it. then he is off, back to the desk in the workshop.  
  
Priyahnka runs. Sheer velocity yanks her hair out of the sodden confines of her clothes to smack against her back in a pulverizing metronome.  She hurries across the field to begin her circuit around the wide fields, just inside the tree line, a quarter mile in every direction around the workshop in a long, round egg shape. Priyahnka is more than willing to run these sets, if only so that she can be done. She would not ever undo the choice to hunt beasts, to protect Gascoigne and the life he lives. It still stood to reason that one could be grateful for the opportunities afforded to them and angry about the strain all at once.  
  
Tomorrow she must go to the grocer and fetch Gascoigne some rice. The pantry has been out of carrots and onions for the past few weeks.  Second lap, now. She had been meaning to pick up a goat at some point and cook it as well but the nights had gotten away from her more and more. Other way. There were just so many graves to dig though. Why couldn't more people be faster in their search of Yharnham's healing blood.  
  
On the third go around Priyahnka sees Lawrence break through the treeline. A bit foolishly, she speeds up a touch to bring herself closer to him.  
  
"Namaste, Laurence" she calls out irreverently.  
  
"Here is your stipend, outsider. Begone with you, then" he growls out. Apparently in an ill temper, he flings a purse at her as hard as he can. It goes sailing past her head a moment before her right hand reached back and catches it nonchalantly. Lawrence shoots her a malicious glare as he trudges on towards the Workshop. Priyahnka turns up her nose and continues her wind-down run. He can be as sour as that old milk she knows he eats. She had better things to think about that that corroded, old, carrot-headed man. Priyahnka finds her mind occupied with plans and is finished soon enough. She slows considerably as she heads towards the  well lit workshop.  
  
She fetches her day clothes from the trunk outside and changes swiftly. The sweat soaked clothes she folds with the practice of many days behind her hands. The belt of pockets does go inside the workshop, though. Master Gehrman would thrash her within an inch of death if she didn't put it back properly. Master Gehrman is only moving to put away his ledger when she comes inside.  The belt goes on the shelf above the storage chest easily. Priyahnka has a foot out the door before she hears Master Gehrman.

  
"Girl, Lawrence left this for you." Priyahnka turns quickly only to have a coin nearly smack her straight between the eyes. She reflexively returns the projectile. Master Gehrman catches it easily.  
  
"Hmmmm... Keep those skills sharp." He throws the coin back. She assures him that she will and leaves, slipping the coin into her purse of payment. It didn't matter to her if the payment was thrown at her every time as long as she was paid. At least, so she told herself.

  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

The days come and go and Priyahnka hunts at night.While the city sleeps, she protects it from beasts. These terrible creatures born of malice and evil, for whom surely no mother marked them at birth with char, sank their stench into the very stones. When the sun rises she see to it that Mister Gascoigne eats before he leaves for the day, prays, cleans the house and goes to go dig graves. People were dying everyday trying to reach Yharnham's famous healing blood and every body needed a grave. Sometimes she found humor that in leaving a home where everyone knew she was descended from grave diggers, the lowest of the low, she found herself back where she was. Sometimes she grumbles and bitterly laments hat so many people weren't wise enough to hurry up on their way to the cure. Shouldn't they be faster? It's their own lives they were trying to preserve! Most times though she didn't pay it any mind at all and kept digging. It was endless work, and thankless besides. She spends hours digging in the stony soil to lay to rest lives cut short by murder and disease. The healthy and thriving did not want to see her for the most part. The only ones that did often found themselves forever silenced after trying to force her to do as they desired. Despite that Priyahnka found that she liked Yharnham a bit more.

  
Mister Gascoigne slept none the wiser for the knives and the single small onion under his thick pillow. Priyahnka hopes she brings enough positive influences to help him find a good wife, then she might count her duties done and all debts repaid. So many people in the village near a sea would fight and kill each other for the hand of a woman with pearls of water in their curled tresses, why would they not find a wife a valuable prize here as well?

  
She would be no one's wife; she knows that in her bones. For all that she was going to become marriageable soon she found the freedom of travel and the hunt too addictive. She had seen men using opium as she had traveled in the moonlight, guided by the hands of fate. Men fat with gold and power laid down and died as though Lakshmi had left their lands and no amount of churning the ocean would bring her back. They closed their eyes and breathed their last happily in those places, refusing to leave for anything. Priyahnka knew that as far as they were addicted to that opium, she was as far gone for her freedom. She would rise, go where she felt the hands of fate pulling her and stop when she felt their pull no more. No husband would cease her wanderings. She would not allow it.

  
Many of the Yharnham men and women spoke badly of her and Priyahnka knew it. She was a moving curiosity of foreign origin and nothing would make them feel differently. "Outsider" and "dalit" were not so different, it seemed. It did not matter. Priyahnka had lived with it before, at the edge of an ocean and she lives with it here. Her mother is gone in that ocean and Mister Gascoigne is here. He could receive what her mother couldn't. For all that he, too, is  called a foreigner (though less often so, as time passes) the doctor does come to treat him. If in nothing else, Yharnham is a better place. There are a great many opportunities for growth and change in Yharnham. One of them happens at the market.  
  
They were out in search of a new coverlet, as Gascoigne's current one had grown nigh unusable with time and rough treatment, and a new skirt, as her meager belongings were already beginning to fray and wear themselves thin, when he saw her. Gascoigne's unstoppable stride faltered in mid-step as they passed the butcher's dreary store front. When Priyahnka turned to him to inquire about his sudden stillness she found that his head was turned away. Following his gaze she saw a woman. Priyahnka knew her.  
  
The thin wisp of a thing with blue eyes that always seemed sad was very well known. Viola she was called. Priyahnka had seen the flowers Viola had been named after and had not been overly impressed. Priyahnka had been named for a plant as well, and hers was much more useful. Still, maybe it was the delicateness of Viola that would make her a match for Gascoigne. It seemed to be a large draw for the rest of Yharnham's peculiar men. They all but swarmed her and her father as they stepped from the butcher's door. One such looker-on hung well back from the bolder men near the doorway, still reeling from being spurned by Viola and more importantly her father. The wizened man would hear of no suitors for his flower. More than one man had been driven out of town after attempting to court Viola without his consent. Though, some say they went no-where but a grave. Priyahnka was inclined to agree.  
  
Being a gravedigger and a hunter besides, she knew who accounted for most of the graves within Yharnham's gates. Most of them. Viola's father had been seen skulking around in the church cemeteries in the dark of night near a few patches of suspiciously overturned earth. Gehrman, who had been a stranger who had become more than a stranger, had no desire to dirty his hands with human affairs. The healing church didn't pay hm or her to mind the morals of humans. Priyahnka was inclined to let Viola's father do away with these men before. It was not up to her to kill men, just beasts.

  
Right now, Gascoigne, as kind as he was, was standing in the street staring dumbly, like a beast. She had the feeling someone would come and roll a carriage over the both of them soon enough if she didn't do something.

  
"Mister Gascoigne?" Priyahnka gently put her hand on his elbow. He jumped a bit, startled and blushed when Priyahnka failed to contain her laughter. He grinned a wolfs grin and shoved her lightly as they walked on, chuckling along with her.

  
She considered the situation absently as Gascoigne resumed his journey for a new coverlet with her following behind him, if Mister Gascoigne was interested in Viola, killing the competition would only make things easier. After all, Mister Gascoigne deserved nice things. If he wanted Viola, he would have her. And when the Viola's father decided to kill Gascoigne she would set a beast or something more monstrous upon him. She absently scuffed her heel against the rank stones of the street, feeling the Hunter's Saw Badge strapped against her ankle dig satisfyingly into her flesh. Priyahnka smiled a bit and thought about what or whom might be more fearsome and monstrous, indeed. All that would come later, though. They had errands to run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Culture notes: What Priyahnka refers to at the start of the capter "no mother marked them at birth" is a practice done to protect children from the evil eye. One marks the head of a child wit charcoal or something similarto make the child 'imperfect.'
> 
> In Indian art around this time women were depicted ringing water from their hair as the picture of beauty. "pearls of water in their hair" is a reference to the art style and reported indian sensibilities of the time. Although how she knows that, being an outcast, we're glossing over.
> 
> Lakshmi was a godess of hardwork and luck among other things. When she was insulted Lakshmi left the human lands and caused many to die as a result. The gods had to churn the milky ocean for a thousand year before she would return, reborn out of a lotus flower in the ocean. You can read the story here.  
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/hinduism/deities/lakshmi.shtml


	3. Break apart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The structure of The workshop and Priyahnka's life changes

"So," Priyahnka begins as she lowers herself to the ground next to Djura. He leans against the solid wood of the workshop's back. Quietly he grasps a hand fill of dust and lets it fall through his fingers, lifting it to his eyes over and over again as it escapes, before finally flinging it away into the moonlit night. Djura falls back against the workshop, seemingly exhausted by his fit of rage. He is only a few years older than her but already seems so tired and aged. The night drags on for a long moment, crickets and nightbirds are drowned out by the chaos happening on the other side of that wooden walls. Shouts rise and fall, Djura and Priyahnka both flinch when they feel something smash against their resting spot from the inside. Djura turns his head to her with an air of deep grieving.

"It got her across the chest. Took off an arm before we could get there." The leather of his gloves cries out against the pressure on it.couldn't get it off of her. It took her over the side. It must triggered one of her delayed molotovs on the way down.... There- there wasn't- she isn't." Djura breaks off, voice fractured into peices.

"She was a good woman" Priyahnka consoles him. Its not the type of thing one needs to hear when your mother has fallen in the middle of the hunt. It is sincere though and all she has. Djura, ever-quiet, sky eyed Djura shudders silently through the tears. The sounds of thrown objects picks up in frequency behind them as Priyahnka leans towards Djura, offering him what scant bit of physical comfort she can. He takes it silently, but with obvious gratitude. She feels the tears on her shoulder but does not say anything.

Eudora Oto's death the night before had brought things to a head in the Hunter's Workshop. Master Gehrman, already practical beyond standard measure, had never been fond of Eudora's mechanical contraptions and had not been quiet about it before. Eudora , being jovial by nature effortlessly rebuffed his venom with the ease of one assured that one day everyone would see her design for what it was. With Eudora gone, and partially by one of her own toolls' work no less, was a delayed molotov in itself. Low burning resentment between Eudora's students and faithful followers that had called themselves the Oto Workshop with pride and the other members of the workshop's ranks had boiled over into a powder keg of in fighting in a matter of hours. Things had been ceased the night before, as the dawn waited for no one but with the beginning of a new night it had resumed almost more quickly than it had begun. Anyone that might have noticed that Djura was not inside and cared had long since been distracted by heated words and petty grudges hours ago. It was just Priyahnka and Djura.

"They're leaving you know," Djura's voice is breathy as he cries. 

"I know." Even if they hadn't been about to of their own volition, Master Gehrman would have probably grasped the opportunity to forced the out with both hands anyway. There had been complaints about the ineffective mature of the Oto workshop's tools. Several hunters had been less than pleased to have a plume of fire sprout up from the back of the beast they were hunting. The loud and attention attracting nature of the explosions had made them far from the desired hunters for hunting in the city proper. Gehrman considered their unique weapons to be just as much a liability if they cooperated with any non Oto hunter. Ludwig, with his mystical blade plucked from antiquity itself, was well loved amongst fellow hunters. It had, thusly, only increased the malcontent against the Oto when he came back to the workshop one night, complaining of a delayed rope molotov going off very nearly in his face. 

The Oto were as different from the rest of their hunters as their badge was. The Oto workshop hunters were as curved and peculiar as their Firing hammer badge. It was really only a matter of time before they clashed with the straight lines of the Radiant Sword hunters or the efficient brutality of the Saw Hunters badge. Priyahnka had thought that Gehrman might have reconsidered; she had hope that he could see past that and find the usefulness of centralizing their hunters. but, any hope of that had gone out the window when Emmaline called Matthiew's proficiency with his Beast Cutter into question and Aldbert retaliated with a jibe about her piercing rifle and it all went to shit.

It was a shame to loose Eudora,doubly so when her lover, and Priyahnka's friend, Gratia had disappeared a month before. Gratia had not been overly friendly, but she had been supportive of whomever she co-operated with, lifting injured hunters to safety and always carrying spare vials of healing blood. Gratia had been dutiful, if a bit quick to anger and now where there had been two hunters of great dignity there was nothing. nothing but a young man crying, rejecting requests for delayed molotovs because "She kept the schematics in her head, never put them on paper."

Priyahnka sits with Djura in the cool night air as the rest of the Oto workshop, despondent with anger and despair storm out of the confines of the Hunters Workshop for the last time,spewing curses as they go. Like an animal with its head missing the stumble out past the treeline. Priyahnka stares up at the sky, stares at nothing. Djura stares blankly ahead, maybe he truly is looking at her lap but Priyahnka doubts it.  
Priyahnka and Djura fall into a light sleep, both too well trained to completely let go until the sun is up. The sky is noticeably lighter, but still well before dawn when Djura stirs. Most of the assembled hunters that had not been forced out had long since left. Only Gehrman remained inside. Priyahnka was still unsure weather or not he had a house somewhere or simply slept inside. The doors stand closed against the outside, barring any entry at all. Djura's tears have log since dried and Priyahnka stands as he does, hyper aware of the coolness of the night on the skin where his head once laid.

"I must go. there are affairs to put in order." Djura's voice is raw and thick with greif. Absently he dusts off his clothing. He does his best to pay no attention to the tracks of tears against his skin or the swelling of his eyes. Djura is doing him best to put himself back together but the fault lines are apparent and the facade, weak. "Know this, you are always welcome in the Oto Workshop." He reaches behind him and pulls out a Firing Hammer Badge, shining copper bright in the light of the moon. Priyahnka takes it with both hands. Djura watches her string it and tie it to her calf, right above her Saw hunter Badge. They stand facing each other for a long minute. 

Priyahnka does not want to let go of Djura, kind, thoughtful Djura, but he is leaving and she must let him go. Priyahnka feels cheated of a friend. She is angry at the foolishness of those around her. It will not be the last time they see each other, fortunes willing. They may see each other on hunts and he is always welcome to request her presence in town at anytime. She tells him as much. He smiles at her, it is a chipped, hollow thing, but it's all he has to give right now and she can't begrudge him that.

"Namaste." Priyahnka presses her hands together, trembling with furious sorrow.

"Namaste, Priyahnka" Djura responds in kind, care put into each syllable. His hands fall back to his side as he turns. "May your pistol never empty." Then quieter, "be safe."

Then he is gone.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

It is three months before they see each other again. Fed up with the noticeable decrease in hunters and lack of amiable conversation outside of Henryk, Priyahnka takes a free moment to make her way to Old Yharnham. Some of the houses on the way there seem to have been knocked down or collapsed and they appear to be building something in the vacated spaces. It's grand, whatever it is. She can see magnificent size and lofty aspiration in the skeletal structures that slowly form as she passes by them. Whatever it is, she doubts it will matter much to her. Priyahnka hurries down the slope towards Old Yharnham and through the stone gate.   
Djura is outside when she arrives at his home. He is leaning against the wall and staring up at the sky.But, Dreaming Djura isn't unaware. He lifts his hand in greeting as Priyahnka moves beside him. 

"Much has changed since we last spoke."

"So I've heard," Djura chuckles. "Your Gascoigne, got married, then? You are living with Henryk now, I've heard." Him and half of Central Yharnham it feels like. Being a walking curiosity had many drawbacks.  
"It's true. Her name is Viola." While Priyahnka was not overly impressed, she would allow that Viola seemed to be the farthest thing from her father, in manner and deed. "He's happy with her. He's so affectionate with her. He feeds her whatever she wants, takes such care of her, treats her like a cow."

"Hmmmm. And Henryk?"

Priyahnka considered her time with Henryk. "He has been good. "

Initially, she had been unsure of his offer and had adamantly refused the suggestion to stay with Henryk. She would not marry,she insisted, she had not even begun to bleed yet. What kind of wife would she be? Priyahnka did her best to dance around the fact that she simply didn't want to ever be a wife. When Gehrman bade her be silent Henryk explained that he had no use for a wife of any sort, bleeding or not, as he had already had one and loved her still, though she was long gone. And while that was still true, he was technically able to marry again or simply host her in his home. While earth-toned Henryk looked different than most of the Yharnhamites with their pallid skin and pinched faces, he was born and raised within its walls and of some renown in the city as a fair and benevolent landlord. Being known as his wife would bring some privileges to make Priyahnka's life somewhat easier. 

She wouldn't have to dig graves as a pretense for where her money came from, she could use some of his acquired wealth for whatever she needed. Priyahnka would be not thought of as kindly if she lived with him but was not his wife, he admitted, but even that is better than living on the street and being unprotected from any stray beast. Priyahnka listened carefully as her vehemence died down. She weighed her options in silence as he went on, looking up to the moon as if asking for guidance.When Henryk had finished outlining his offer and the moon offered her no instruction she breathed deep of the night air, let a silent sigh loose into the darkness and agreed.  
"As long as Gascoigne is well cared for. If this Viola woman turns out to be like her father, then I will kill her and return to Gascoigne's." The first one to show her kindness with no cost was still Gascoigne and Henryk was just as kind if not kinder but old debts must be paid in full first.

Djura listened attentively as she spelled it all out for him. His eyes track a gaggle of women moving down the road. One of them smiles at him. He smiles and nods back.

"It is a relief to not have to stay at the workshop with Gehrman like Maria used to."

"I have heard that she went missing."

"She did. All of her letters have stopped. She had some sort of fight with Gehrman before she left. I did not hear what they fought about. I have been receiving letters until last month, but she never responded to the ones i sent and no more have come. I do not think we will ever see her again." Priyahnka sighs and feels the noonday sun warming her hair and skin.

"More's the pity. She was a fine hunter. Very smart, too. Kind.....very kind." Priyahnka and Djura watch silently as a carriage rolls by, all done up in ebony and filigree.

"I've heard Emmaline has been let loose into your forge. 'BoomHammer', really?"

"You know Emmaline. She designed that Rifle Spear I sent you. She's smart but a bit more direct than the rest of the Powder Keg."

"Powder Keg means , what again? Thank you for the weapon, by the way. It handles well."

"You are quite welcome, my friend. A powder keg is a store of gun powder. A lot of it, all in one place. If you light it up the whole thing explodes. One little spark is all it takes to send it up. Christoph herded some beasts into an abandoned house along the road and threw a torch at the powder keg inside."

"So that's what happened to those buildings." Priyahnka isn't very surprised at all.

"Indeed. We found it a fitting title after we left. Speaking of it." Djura reaches over absently, gently bumping his hand into hers. When he opens her hand he leaves behind a blood vial filled with not blood, but gunpowder. The seal where the cork meets the glass is lined in gold. The Powder Keg badge is small and odd and an excellent symbol for their group. She slips it into her shirt. The silent welcome to their ranks fits very well close to her heart.

"Priyahnka, I have given some thought to, er, the Nature of hunting." Priyahnka turns to him. Djura is no longer looking skywards, but down at the stone roads. His eyebrows sit heavy on his face as though bearing him down. See can see his hands twitching together in a fidget.

"I love my brothers and sisters in the Powder Kegs. We have been paragons of hunting since we were cast out of the workshop. But i find myself disturbed. These beasts we hunt. They were once our friends and family. How can I go on destroying families and breaking hearts by killing these people. They cannot tell reason from nonsense but they are still people, aren't they?"

"What started these thoughts?"

"On the last hunt, a riverman had turned. He had attacked some travelers when we found him. We managed to wound him but he escaped. We gave chase and when we caught sight of it again he was fishing. It kept swiping its claws into the river. It kept bringing up fish and putting them in a tethered boat."

" It wailed and cried as we cut it down. How much of the riverman was still in there? I can not begin to say. He must have been so afraid."

"Since then i cannot look upon all our victories and feel any happiness. It feels like murder. I do not know what to do."

Priyahnka and Djura stand in silence as the bell of the tower chimes the hour.

"Fighting wins battles," Priyahnka begins. "And battles save lives, but that whether or not a battle is won depends on which life you want to save." Priyahnka leans towards Djura and he takes the invitation for what it is. The warmth of his shoulder against hers dwarfs the sun on her face. "Is it the beasts you pity more or the people who miss the people they were? I cannot say for sure. You must make your own peace."


	4. Reasons to Double Tap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bad things happen when a hunter gets sloppy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> rewritten chapter 4. includes an extra serving of Priyahnka's eternal spite and a smidge of fashionborne

 

The night is nearing its end and the beast Priyahnka has cornered in Old Yharnham is doing what cornered animals do best. It struggles. It is silent as it fights, swinging claws and teeth, lacerations waiting to occur. This one appeared to have been a woman, dressed in a torn white cloth and clutching a tiny leg, no doubt from the child that probably used to be hers before she turned. Priyahnka thinks of Djura and his conundrum with the fishing beast as she throws knife after knife at the silently flailing creature. This one certainly isn't fishing, metaphorically or otherwise, and she has no qualms killing it. The beast, silent this whole while, finally lets out a pained yelp as Priyahnka's knife catches it in the throat.  
  
It vainly swings out its arms in choking panic and rage. The beast leaves blood and hair in the air behind it as it jerks and squirms. Priyahnka isn't one for cruelty so she decides to put it out of its misery as quickly as possible. Her hand moves from her pouch full of knives to grab the strap holding her rifle spear to her back. A quick tug separates the clasp where iron meets cloth and she swings the Riflespear blade first into the squirming beast. She carves a silver wound into the air as it goes. It is already choking on its own blood so it dies without much fuss, though it does manage to give her a nasty scratch on the face on its way down  
.  
Priyahnka recoils and drops her Riflespear, which thankfully does not fire, with a sharp clack. She hisses and curses, clutching the swelling cut that is already beginning to leak blood into her left eye.She shakes off the pain easily and scoops her Riflespear back into her loving hangs. She brings it down on the beast again and again. _How dare the beast scratch her as it died? It was one of many made to fall before her. It wasn't special._ Blood flies through the air as she tears the beast apart. When she finishes the chest of the beast is a gory mess of ribs and hair. Priyahnka breathes in deeply and releases it in a huff of satisfaction as she looks at the deceased creature on the ground. Revenge now over, she pulls her throwing knives out of the walls and flesh around her. she grasps the handles with certainly and they come away easily and slip into a pouch with a satisfying clink. The Riflespear goes onto her back easily, magnetic clasp sticking together with no problem.  
  
Priyahnka tears up a little as her cut drips and wipes the blood from her eye. the spread out street lamps and candles in distant windows blur like they are under sea water as she passes them, dragging the beast back into the house it came from. Priyahnka is struck with a painful bolt of memory of when the sea used to glow back in when she lived in that house on the sand by the sea. The ocean churns in her ears as she opens the splintered door. Priyahnka can smell the salt and heat in the air as she spreads oil over the dead beast and the family it used to belong to. The waning light of the moon in the unshuttered window burns her back with a reminder of the shortness of time as she bends over the corpses of a family.  
  
The child, or what used to be, is milk-skinned like all the others in this town. It lies limp and still. Half of its body is gone, part of it eaten, part of it on its way there, in the now deceased hands of its mother. She can't tell if it was a boy or a girl, children all look much the same at that age, to her. She can tell that the child ought to have been buried, not burned with the rest of its family. She consoles herself that it'll make its way there after the fire. They bury everything that dies in Yharnham, even when it's ashes. The corpse of a man lies draped over the stairs further into the house. He is not as pale skinned as the other Yharnhamites. It is a dusty sort of color somewhere between her skin and the child's. She stares for a long moment and wonders where he came from. It's too late to get any answers out of him though so she leaves off quickly and goes back to work.

  
She can see another child in a doorway, definitively female and most certainly dead given that her hand is separated from the rest of her body and she's not making a move to stem the bleeding. She can see the corpse of the child and its long hair shining in the moonlight as she drags the corpse of the man into the center of the room.  Its not nearly as long as hers but it is thick and curling and golden. The child is gone, all her family too. Priyahnka almost wants to take the hair with her, braided up and shoved into  a pouch, find some use for it. It seems a shame to not turn it into a useful memorial. But, although she is a scavenger at heart, she would not steal from corpses. Doubly so for those with so uneasy an end. Priyahnka grabs the last corpse and lets them all lay together as a family as she douses the house with oil. The house goes up in flames an hour and a half before dawn as she hastens towards the hunters workshop.  
  
It is an hour later and the sun is beginning to brighten the sky in gradual shades of blue when Priyahnka steps into the empty grounds of the hunters workshop. Everyone is long gone by now, Ludwig and the rest of them doubtlessly come and gone. Henryk is probably back at the house by now. Priyahnka does not look forwards to hearing from Gehrman and his opinion on letting the hunt run so long. Priyahnka considers facing it honestly and full on and decides that she'd rather not when she doesn't have to. The house she and Henryk share is not too far away that she wouldn't be able to reach it unseen. Henryk is well acquainted with hunting, being a hunter himself, and she would not be in any danger of being exposed if she were to leave her hunting gear there until the day when Gehrman would be off in Cathedral ward, with the Choir members or squawking away with Lawrence.  
  
Priyahnka has one metaphorical foot out the metaphorical door when she hears noises coming from within the walls of the workshop. At first she is alarmed because that noise sounded like Gehrman. Then she feels vindicated. She knew it! she knew Gehrman just lived in there! She knew he didn't have a separate house! But then she is quickly over taken by what exactly she is hearing.  
  
Priyahnka was never educated with highest of honors or venerated for any great task, but she isn't stupid. She sees how Master Gehrman sighs and goes doe eyed over Maria's old letters to him. She has even seen her own letters from Maria be dragged into his pile of correspondence and stowed away for further rumination. By now Priyahnka is sure that there was something beyond Master and Student with the two of them. Heretofore she had been unsure of the exact nature of their relationship, but the noises coming from inside the workshop were very, VERY telling. On one hand, Priyahnka considered that no knowledge was ever wasted. On the other hand, Priyahnka did not ever really need or want to hear Gehrman touching himself. She most certifiably never wanted to hear him moaning for her dissappeared comrade in arms and fellow apprentice.  
  
Priyahnka recoils from the door with a grimace. Even if she had decided to go in face her a scolding she would have been faced with something worse than a lecture from her teacher. So, she considers herself to be, if not intelligent, than somewhat wise. Henryk was surely waiting at home, worried for the welfare of the woman that the rest of Yharnham treats as his wife, she tells herself as she bolts away from the workshop and the sounds within. It is truly the heart of wisdom to avoid unneeded conflict, isn't it, she consoles herself  as she shudders in disgust.  
  
She should have expected something like that. He had changed since Maria dissappeared. Gehrman snaps more often but with less heart behind it now, and she does not mind it overly much. She is very nearly to the end of her training under him, besides. She can hold on for a little while longer. He trains her  as though he were under the eye of a strict teacher, himself. Despite his training and sparring his attention wanders now more than ever and it vaguely concerns her. He is a master of his craft and her teacher besides, but he is just a man and  he could be felled at any time. His when his eyes gain that far off misty look he does his best to hide, Priyahnka wonders if she'll see it on his face as he dies due to inattention. The night's events only compound the worry. She wasn't very stealthy in her approach of the workshop. If he does die of his own heart sick stupidity she'll dig him a grave out back the workshop and pour his ashes into it so she can call him a fool everyday.  
  
  
The night is come and gone when Priyahnka considers her hunting attire, once she has cleaned the house. Cleaning the dried blood off of the leather is only mildly taxing. The scrubbing motions are only a little harsh, just enough to be felt. The brush of the cloth against the leather is faint and soothing, like mantras drifting on the wind. The Belt of pouches sits well away, tucked neatly in a corner, waiting patiently to be returned like a loyal dog. Without the belt it looks less like a protective coating and more like a child's plaything. She barely fits into it,which can only make it look more so like a toy. The other hunters, all stand taller than her by a fair amount. Dreamy Djura was the least offensive in height difference and even he was half her head taller  
.  
She is sure that the height difference was making her attire hang so heavily on her. A few months ago she had been shorter and even now she could feel the difference in how it pulled at her. Still, she can only grow so much and it was relentlessly heavy. Perhaps one of the stronger hunters could brush off the weight as negligible but Priyahnka could not. Frustrated, she scrubs harder.The mantra like rhythm is replaced with a sound like a rising storm.  In her rage she almost doesn't notice the button come off of the left hand side. The clink it makes pulls her eyes to it. It rolls across the ground impertinently and dissapears into a crack in the floor board before she can think to grasp it. Priyahnka stares for a long moment at the crack in the wood and silently feels her blood curdle with anger. Well, if she couldn't have the button back she would have no buttons.  
  
She starts very deliberately. The first button is pulled gently away from the coat exposing the sturdy thread. She slips her knife in the space between button and leather, severing the attachment. She sets it down continues onto the next one. The next is less delicate, and faster. It continues on until she is ripping buttons off the coat in furious silence. She tries not to think about how tired she is, tired of this heavy coat dragging her down. She is tired of buttons and friends and hunters falling through cracks never to be seen again. She is tired of this heavy thing clanking like Gehrman circling her or Lawrence throwing money at her as though hoping it would set her ablaze. Priyahnka's brow furrows as she grimaces. She deftly slashes and tears and pulls until every single piece of metal is gone from her hunter's garb and more than metal besides.  
  
Priyahnka is left with her sliced up garb but does not stop moving. As though she were flowing with the force of tumultuous ocean waves she prowls around her allotted space and gathers her things to her. The buttons are long since scattered and all manner of buckle and loop and hook are likewise discarded. The arms of the coat were sliced off in the commotion, she cuts it into strips, knots strips into a belt. Her woefully outgrown clothes part easily under her blade. She slices and pins and sews cloth and leather together. She is breathing fitfully at the end of it, shaking with anger and directionless energy, Priyahnka looks down at the her hunting attire and feels that she has made something Good.  
  
The next night, the hunters converge on their workshop and Gehrman doesn't scold her for ruining her hunters garb. He eyes her shortened hem and bare arms, the  cuts running up and down the sides of the coat revealing clay stained cloth beneath, the leather ties all down the front and grimaces. He stalks into the workshop, and reemerges to throw a cloth wrapped bundle at her. When Priyahnka unwraps it she discovers that it is not cloth wrapped, it _is_ cloth. It is black and blood red and feels lighter than her coat ever was. It is the same as Master Gehrman's cape.  
  
"If you're already changing your clothes like a journeyman, you should be one. You're no apprentice anymore, Priyahnka," he grouses. At first Priyahnka tamps down her anger to offer an apology before his words sink in. Gehrman is off before she can think of anything to say. She wraps it around herself and moves into the darkness with ease. She is ready to celebrate the recognition by hunting her first beast free from the shelter of Gehrman's wing. She does not even notice the new trunk at the end of the Workshop, lock gleaming in the candle light.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  
  
Ashen Blood, a strange illness was now running rampant across the width and breadth of Old Yharnham. Djura and his compatriots were safe from it for the moment, but how long would that last? Henryk and Priyahnka were hosting as many Powder Kegs at once as they could, but not everyone could stay in one home. It couldn't keep them safe forever,in any case. The Healing Church  was handing out healing blood hand over fist. Every hunter knew that soon Old Yharnham would be swarming with beasts. Already the numbers were rising steadily, beasts with Ashen Sickness in their claws and teeth turned almost daily. Where there were beasts there would be hunters. Powder Kegs, ready to earn the respect of the hunters that once scorned them took to the streets with a vengeance every night, exposing themselves to infection again and again.  
  
Infection aside, Rumor, insidious as always, had gotten around the hunters that Priyahnka would be taking Henryk up on his offer of marriage without any regard for the actual state of things. Rumor left out a great deal of context and the Hunters with their beast cutters and saw spears entertained themselves with crude jokes at their expense. Priyahnka was no stranger to unfriendly jibes, but Henryk's kindness would not be repaid with slander, she wouldn't stand for it. They had been quite unhappy to find that their day clothes had been ground into the mud when they returned to the Church Workshop, but were unable to catch her and dole out punishment as she was the fastest hunter there when Gehrman wasn't around.  
  
Beast hunting in the dark of night had been a secret as mysterious and murky as the depths of the ocean. But like all secrets it had to end somewhere.The blood festering in the veins of men had been turning rotten more and more often.There were far more beasts and the Healing Church could no longer hide the scourge. Slowly they began revealing the truth to sections of the populace at a time. The staggered revelations had led to a swelling in hunter ranks and the general acceptance in the selected areas. That had led to the decision that soon the church would reveal the plague to all, Gascoigne among them, but not its source(which Priyahnka did not care much about.She had no moral compunctions to help these people aside from Gascoigne and Viola by extension).  
  
Most importantly Ludwig had been selected by the Healing Church to run the new Church Hunter Workshop, leaving her Master, Gehrman, abandoned along with his workshop. Not even a fortnight had passed since Gehrman and Henryk made their plans and cut down beasts with Priyahnka in the thick of shadows and now they were being revealed to the city. However it was for her, she could not image how it must have been for Gehrman. His whole life was the Hunters' Workshop and now he was obsolete. Priyahnka was less than thrilled to deal with Gehrman's no doubt furious temper but she went dutifully anyway. She arrived at  the workshop to find it empty. Gehrman was gone and the altar away from the entrance was stained with pale, almost milky, blood.  
  
Some hunters, such as Henryk and herself, continued to base their operations out of the old Workshop, even with the Church's lavish workshop looming over them, attempting to blot out the moon in the sky with its sheer presence. Most other hunters packed up their pistols and shuffled over to new Workshop with no regard for Priyahnka's hissed utterances of "traitor" and remarks on their loyalty.The new hunters went their way, following Ludwig, as Priyahnka, Henryk and a few others remained in Gehrman's workshop. Still, they all hunted beasts under the Healing Church and were not permitted to cut one another down in vengeance regardless of anyone's feelings. They best they could do was attempt to make their loathed cohorts' job as miserable as possible. It was petty, but ensuring she (for muddying their attire) and Henryk (for failing to control his 'outsider strumpet') were stuck on Yharnham patrol was the best punishment they would ensure without risking the wrath of Ludwig of the Healing Church.  
  
The other hunters had all split up Yharnham amongst themselves by the time Priyahnka and Henryk made their way out into the thick of the night. That, of course, left them with patrolling Yharnham proper, a tedious job with many civilians to avoid and little chance of fighting with anything more terrible than your patrol partner. Even Old Yharnham was a more desirable hunting ground, though the place was lousy with beasts. The lack of anything to do had her and Henryk occasionally chatting throughout the night. Ordinarily a hunt involved total silence followed by frenzied roars and a quick, but brutal fight. It had been unthinkable that a hunter would have time to talk to anyone, when Gehrman was still around. Each hunter had been deadly, silent and singular as they raced to cover as much ground in the night as they could. Beasts came out at night and city folk went indoors at night for the most part. With an entire city and its outskirts to cleanse of vile monsters, the sparse population of hunters had been a matter of quality over quantity.  
  
It was now as though she were playing that new Reversi game with Gascoigne, all that had been black was now white. It was certainly fitting, what with church hunters beginning to clothe themselves in white. Priyahnka told Henryk as much as they walked past Iosephka's clinic. Even the walking was an anomaly she would have to get used to. All but the quickest of paces was far too slow to be employed on a hunt night but the decreased ground to cover hunters could just amble on down the streets of Yharnham. As they turned the corner they split off into different directions. Priyahnka was in the middle of a hunt with no quarry in the safest part of Yahrnham. The cape given to her to protect from attacks and furious claws only served to protect her chilled arms from the tepid weather. The night had been silent for half an hour and Priyahnka found herself dissapointed that Gehrman had disappeared. She would give good money to hear his reaction to this state of affairs.  
  
Later, when Priyahnka thinks back on this she will remember the offended rage she felt upon having Henryk ghost towards her and mutter into her ear that there seemed to be a disturbance nearby and that it seemed to be headed to the north, almost directly to Gascoigne's home. At the time however she feels horror, blood-lust and a giddy kind of spite, but primarily the soul wrenching fear. She's sure the fury shows on her face quite clearly, given that what she can see of Henryk's face appears to be unsurprised but sympathetic. It wouldn't do for a hunter to get carried away and whipped into a frenzy in times of crisis, Gehrman had taught her in not so many words ,and cool headed, kind Henryk couldn't have agreed more. Gehrman had been of the opinion that cold calculation was the surest strategy, but Priyahnka felt that bitter anger had its place as well. There was no better time to put that to the test. Priyahnka and Henryk sped off into the darkness of the Yharnham night, leaving the scent of flowers and blood in their wake.  
  
They barely caught sight of the beast as they came to the Great Bridge to Cathedral Ward. Even with their eyes trained on every scrap of movement it was difficult to spot their prey. Even with its tail turned to them the creature was tremendous and visibly wounded. It had run into someone armed and came out the victor. Annoyance sprouted in the back of her mind. Of course, one of those untested, overly proud hunters went ahead and died. She charged towards it, clutching her gifted RifleSpear in a death grip, and didn't put too much effort into trying not to hope that the incompetent hunter was reborn as worm so she could crush him for putting Gascoigne in danger.  
  
The beast was prowling aimlessly at the moment but it wouldn't stand there forever. Priyahnka braced herself against the stones of the street and began throwing knives as quickly as she could. One barely nicked the hindmost leg, but the others all made their mark. The beast yowled and shook, sending knives flying in every direction as it made its escape.  
  
The foul thing scuttled down the stairs on six malformed legs, canine face raised to the sky. It knocked aside men and women of the night as it went, leaving more of them wounded and bleeding than not. Priyahnka grimaced severely. This was a catastrophic disaster. Those foolish new hunters with no kills under their belts were going to ruin them like this. She briefly considered it fortunate that if such a thing had to happen, at least soon it would all be revealed anyway. She and Henryk momentarily glanced towards each other as they tailed the beast down the street. Even if things were going quite badly, she could appreciate that things were going badly with a trusted comrade that felt the same way about the whole mess.  
  
Priyahnka quickened herself mid-stride and swung at the beast. Its hindmost leg came off with a spray of blood and a scream. The foul thing ceased its retreat, turning around to face her. As Priyahnka jumped back, Henryk came in high from the other side and shredded the beast's emaciated back with his saw cleaver. Soon the thing was caught in a back and forth between the two. The thing was limber, even being one leg short, and leaped over Priyahnka as though she were no taller than a candle. It swiped its claws and kicked its legs at Priyahnka as it rapidly descended. Priyahnka pulled the lever on her weapon and fired her RifleSpear. The creature flew backwards with the intense momentum but recovered quickly. It lunged forwards  jaws open wide. She moved herself just out of the way of its attack and raised an arm to behead the damned thing. She didn't get the chance as the head spun around and lashed out with a whip-like tongue. She jerked backwards with the force of the blow and clutched the large open wound on her chest. Now that she was out of range Henryk found the beast intent on breaking his arm with that tongue of its'. Henryk led the creature down the street away from her as Priyahnka broke a vial of Healing Blood right over the wound. The wound burned with sensation between a tingle and an itch as it closed itself like it had never been there. She was vaguely aware of the same thing happening in smaller amounts as the Blood closed up tiny scrapes she hadn't noticed. She jams the but of the RifleSpear into a crack between cobblestones and levered herself up in a flash.  
  
Priyahnka sped to rejoin Henryk and found him and the beast far too close to Gascoigne's home. The adrenaline and blood within her sang as she raced up behind the unsuspecting creature, before running it through with her Spear with a viscous crunch. Henryk followed up with a blow of his own, severing two of the remaining legs. The monster attempted to lift itself on a single limb, let out a guttural howl and collapsed, silent. Henryk and Priyahnka stood, at the ready for a long moment before judging that the beast wasn't going to get back up.  
  
"I'm going to see who needs blood," Henryk informed her as he turned towards the alley full of Yharnhamites that had just met their first beast. Priyahnka nodded as he and his bleeding heart went to tend to the literally bleeding hearts.  
  
Any joy the victory might have brought her is cut short as she realized that most of the windows in the street were alive with lights and voices. Each parted curtain and cracked door was full of curious civilians' peeping eyes. One doorway isn't 't cracked, it is wide open and standing in it was Gascoigne.  
  
Priyahnka was frozen. This was not how she thought telling Gascoigne about hunting would go. She had imagined a calm day in the near future, as she set came to visit. Gascoigne would tell her about the beasts and ask if she knew. Perhaps he would have even sounded concerned for her safety. However, that was not to pass because she was standing, covered in blood, her hair askew, clutching a weapon as long as her arm next to the cooling corpse of a beast at midnight. Priyahnka was struck by the similarities to the first day they met, as he stood in the light with an unnameable glint in his eye and she stood, dripping fear wrapped around an iron will.  
  
"Namaste," she mutters, bowing slightly despite the weapon she still carried.  
  
"Namaste," he responds, a bit absently. He doesn't appear angry or repulsed, just concerned. Priyahnka feels the tension fall away.  
  
At that moment Priyahnka felt that everything would be alright. In the next moment she heard Henryk yelling her name in panic. She turned to see him racing towards her, eyes trained on the ground beside her. Her eyes darted downwards, just as the still living beast's tongue darted up towards her neck.  
  
"Gas-!"  
  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
Priyahnka is born.  
  
Just like everyone else.  
  
She takes her first steps at one year, two months and seven days. Her first word is Choir. The Choir member that collects orphans for the Healing Church's experiments looks at her a long time before smiling.  
  
"Truly, a fortunate find." The choir member takes her away from the other children that look nothing like her. She doesn't know why she hopes it, but Priyahnka hope that the choir woman will take her to the sea. She's never been there, but she misses it so much.  
  
She does not go to the sea.  
  
Priyahnka is born.  
She never leans to talk. She doesn't need to. She lives underground, in the soil that is both food and shelter before the rain washes her up and out. She doesn't comprehend the boot that comes down to step on her, though she does experience the feeling of deserved resignation for the only time in her life as it crushes her.  
  
Priyahnka is born. Her first word is soft. She never learns to walk.  
  
Priyahnka is born. She is drowned in milk immediately.  
  
Priyahnka is born. Her first word is "fire!"  
  
Priyahnka is born

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're really speeding up the process here.
> 
> Priyahnka is briefly reborn as a worm. While it may not be karma in the traditional sense I find it close enough, considering she fervently hoped to step on the hunter that got eaten in his next life.
> 
> The Orphanage is just a front for the church's experiment hall. Since the townspeople think it is an Orphanage of the typical sort they bring children there, where they become celestial emissaries or are raised into Choir members.
> 
> Culture notes: Newborn girls are sometimes drowned in milk when the girl is considered too big a burden upon the family that she was born into. This is sometimes seen as a way of returning her spirit back from whence it came.
> 
> Aug15th 2016 edited to change: "Othello" is replaced with "Reversi" Despite being similar Reversi is actually a separate game. it was a fad in the 1880s in England and thusly Yharnham.  
> http://www.worldothello.org/?q=content/reversi-versus-othello


	5. Wake Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Priyahnka refuses a Yharnham Sunrise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the old chapters 5 and six are smushed together.

Priyahnka is born.

Only she is not born like everyone else. Only she might have been, but she isn't sure. She isn't sure if she's being born right now or not. Not everyone is born an adult, just some people. But, No, that's not the mechanics of it. Sudden existence is very confusing at the best of times and sudden sapience even more so. Priyahnka's brain spins in circles from the get go and she attempts to wrestle it into some semblance of order. She must have been a child. Maybe she still is? She knows she had a life somewhere but she can't seem to recall what it is or where it took place. She attempts to breathe in only to choke viciously. Her hands come up to clutch her throat as she wheezes and hacks. Her convulsions send her falling off of her perch and landing face-down on the floor with a severe sounding thud. 

She slowly lifts herself off the ground and gingerly brushes her now bleeding nose. She wonders if this is normal for her. It could be something that happens every morning. She wouldn't know. She hopes not because she feels confused and embarrassed. Her arm shifts and it brushes something wet. Her nails scrape the floor as she grasps whatever the fall had knocked out of her throat. She squeezes tightly once she gets a grip on it only to drop it immediately in pain. The second tempt, more delicate than the first, is successful and she peers closely at the curious object. It's a seed of some kind, with large thorns on one end of it. She can feel where they scored the inside of her as the seed came up. The green and white on it look like long grass or some kind of crop waving in the wind.

She lets it fall to the wooden floor as she lifts herself up and inspects the room. There are shelves here. Some have books, some do not. The table she fell from seems dusty, even though she had been on it only minutes before. Though she has only just awoken she is weary and needs to rest. She spies a chair and moves towards it slowly and deliberately. The cushion holds a scrap of paper. 

"Priyahnka," it reads, "seek paleblood to transcend the hunt." she can see the areas above it and below it are filled with scratched out words. Traces of then slip through harsh, dismissive lines and others are blotted out with drops of ink. She knows it's her hand writing , though she does not know how. Just as she knows its her name that is on that letter. There is no dread, only curiosity as she grabs the paper and flips it over. 

The back of it is covered in neat, evenly spaced writing. The note from herself and the other side of the paper are not the same language but she can read them both easily. The back of the paper appears to be the will of a man named Aldbert Gherman. It seems he left a meager amount of property to a few people in the case of his death. A workshop to a Maria, Lawrence receives all the tomes and forging equipment within, typical stuff. She almost doesn't notice that her name is on that side of the page as well. It is near the bottom that she seems it. The second time it appears, it is the second to last word on the page.

"In the case that Lawrence is unable to receive his share, the items in questions are to be transferred to Maria. Should Maria be unable to receive either her share or his, the items in question are to be, upon my death,released to Priyahnka Kapoor. In addition I leave to Priyahnka my-"

She flips the paper back over as though the rest of the will would have appeared instead of her hastily scrawled message. Curious and a bit dissapointed, she sets it back down gently. Apparently she was important to someone and she needs to find pale blood to transcend the hunt. Whatever the hunt is, Priyahnka is certain she'll soon find out.

\----------------------------------------------------  
\----------------------------------------------------

"Good hunter, You've done well. The Night is near its end. Now, I will show you mercy. You will die, forget the dream, and awake under the morning sun. You will be freed from this terrible hunter's dream."

Priyahnka, stronger than gods, kneels, lifts her chin and submits herself to this death.

"Farewell, my keen hunter," he says. Priyahnka feels something inside of her, like a plant coming into full bloom or a whirlpool forming in the calmest seas. All at once it overflows into her head,spilling over every empty nook and cranny. "Fear the blood," says than man who taught her all she knew as he raises the scythe that once saved her life and gave her not a purpose but direction. She recalls her last sight of Gascoigne, the madness of Henryk, the fierce Maria that gave her face to that kowtowing toy in the dream. 

"Gehrm-!"

The scythe comes down.

Priyhanka is born kicking and screaming into the Yharnham sunrise. For a brief moment she is in the street, flailing and crying out before she lifts herself onto her feet in boots that aren't hers, in a skin she has only briefly borrowed. She stumbles, gasping, towards the light peering coyly from around the curve of a building. It reveals itself to be the sun. The very sight of it burns her and incites anguish and rage in equal measures as she cringes away from its light. She breathes in, and releases a cry that echos around the city. From Old Yharnham to Hemwick Channel lane every living this can hear a her enraged agony in an inhuman, thunderous wail. Priyahnka wordlessly curses at the sky, at the sun, and vows that This Is Not Over. Priyahnka Kapoor, beloved and celestial, greater than gods, puts all that she is into her declaration, her rush of noise. As swiftly as it came, it ends. The statement is made, the foundations of the world turned just a little bit in the hands of the gods, and now this section of her life is done. Priyahnka Kapoor breathes out serenely, a vessel finally emptied.

Priyahnka's body, newborn and weary pitches forward. She dies in the space between the fall and the landing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Priyahnka Kapoor is born.

She sits up. She throws up. 

Her hands root themselves in her hair as it flows out of her, in a wave of great Nothingness, like a tide going out. Saliva and bile splatters grotesquely against the floor as it rolls down her thighs and over the operating table. Blood and stomach acids stain the dusty, ancient wood of Iosephka's clinic in the dark of night. The sound disturbs her. Was this what her head sounded like as it tumbled off her shoulders onto the cobbled Yharnham streets? She heaves again. Tears and desolation and confusion are drawn forth with every clench of her organs.

She brings up even more blood. There is so much of it. She can feel it in her as though a stray hair had been half swallowed and tickled at the back off her throat. One hand shifted to her face and came away crimson. Her nose was bleeding, too. She was full up with blood. Had she been eating the stuff? She had been healing herself with it, true, but no she was unsure if any of it was hers. It was quite possible that none of the blood flowing in her body was naturally hers. It had probably all been pushed out by the Healing blood scrambling and clamoring over itself in an attempt to wrap its despicable hands around her very being. It was amazing that she herself hadn't become a beast yet. 

She can taste the graveyard dirt in the air and think, not about that any of the terrible beasts she had seen, but about the taciturn giant of a man who she held in awe for his spark of kindness. Gascoigne was a beast now. She had seen it with her own two eyes and done nothing but kill him. How had he even been exposed to blood enough to become a beast? She had been using it for quite a while before....well, before, and then she had veritably guzzled it all through that singular night. How had a Cleric become infused with enough blood to bestow upon him the bitterest of fates imaginable for him? After all she had done, he lost himself. Nostrils flared, he had tracked her by scent as she darted around the gravestones that she had helped place and corpses she had helped bury. That gleam she had seen on his eyes on that first meeting had shone through the bandages that had been hiding his eyes.

But hadn't she learned something about eyes as she stumbled around blindly in the dark? Eyes could be on the inside? Eyes would show you what you could not see? That man on the roof, Wilhelm, before the Great Spider, he knew something about Eyes. 

She had to get to him.

He would reveal these secrets to her and then she would change everything. She would start again. Every step of the journey that must be made would be made. She took her first step twenty minutes into her new life as she slid her bile streaked legs off of the operating table and down onto the floor below. She let her first word be "Gascoigne" as she straightened herself from tear soaked wretch to hand of Kali as she formed within her the will to destroy. This is where her fate has led her, she marvels to herself with an angry sort of wonder, on that night under the moon when she took her first steps away from the hush of a sea that glowed at night.

\-------------------------------  
\-------------------------------

The workshop is just like she remembered. Yet the differences are startling. The trees and the stone wall of the Church Hunter's Workshop are gone. The moon shines down on the kantakari flowers that scratch at her feet in self-defense with all the intensity of the gods themselves. She stands slowly and takes in the pillars in the far distance. They seem to hold up the sky as though Vishnu 's arms had been made visible for all to see. She cannot see the end. Perhaps there isn't an end Priyahnka turns away from the vast, clouded void. 

Her eyes settle briefly on the marionette wearing Maria's face. It kneels at a gravestone that wasn't there before, in either the real world or her last visitation of this place. She fancies it's hers and wonders how her real gravestone looked. She shakes her head, she has no time for that, Priyahnka tells herself and attempts to ignore how her blood feels cold in her body as she thinks on it. 

The overlarge toy stands to face her. The unmoving visage of Maria stares back at her like it was just moving her empty corpse around and Priyahnka finds it revolting beyond anything she had seen in her journey but the fate of Gascoigne. Gascoigne will always be her first concern. She glares at the porcelain thing and turns away from it. There are more important things to be done on this night.

The workshop seems so grandiose compared to her memories of it, but she supposes it might just be the lack of bodies crowding it.

Inside only Master Gehrman sits. His eyes are closed but his breathes are uneven and he is muttering to himself. He is old. He is too old. He dissapeared when the Church took over hunting officially, which could not have been too long ago since Master Gascoigne was still alive. (he is still alive. he is still alive he can be saved.) Master Gehrman looks up at her with aged eyes and introduces himself.

Priyahnka recoils in fear and revulsion as she realizes that he has no idea who she is. Master Gehrman, with his quick wit and strength of heart is gone from this place. The man sitting in that chair, missing his right foot is no longer the man who pushed and taunted and led her to her own greatness. That empty husk would never have had her running laps on or have handed her a blade and led her out in the night to send fearsome creatures running through the darkness. Master Gehrman was just....Gehrman, with creased paper skin and a voice like a abandoned home. She had been like that but had awaken, perhaps he would also wake if pressed. Maybe she won't even need to find that Wilhelm man. Her faith in that is shaky, but nothing ventured...

"Master Gehrman! it is me, Priyahnka Kapoor! You must remember," she pleads. Gehrman looked up at her, eyes bleary. "I am your apprentice. You taught me to sharpen a blade. You gave me your Cape. You taught me to Hunt. Master Gehrman!" She carried on but he sat silent. Not one to give up Priyahnka continued. She had all but worn her heart away with her recountance of their time together when he spoke.

He sighs heavily and begins to grumble a tad. Priyahnka snaps her jaw closed mid-word with a small click of teeth. If he was beginning to wake from his stupor then he would be snappish and he never tolerated others speaking over him. He grumbles a bit more, shifts in his wheeled-chair and then looks directly at her. While still drowsy and sleep blanketed, his gaze cuts through her. Gehrman's eyes narrow with the same careful consideration that he sent her way on their first encounter on that dark night in Old Yharnham. His arm reachs out to her slowly but sure of its path. Gehrman grabs her arm and holds it gently, almost remorsefully.

"You're sure to be in a fine haze about now," he creaks out. Priyahnka nods gratefully, now. Now that Master Gehrman was awake she would surely find her solution with the two of them working on it. Any relief she may have felt came tumbling down with his next words. "But don't think too hard about all of this. Just go out and kill a few beasts. It's for your own good. You know, it's just what hunters do!" 

All at once Priyahnka became alone. This...Thing in the chair was no more her Master than that shambling abomination outside was Maria. Gascoigne was on the verge of becoming a blood drunk beast, all her old cohorts, Maria and Henryk included, were missing, and Gehrman was in a wheelchair, down a foot and laying on the edge of catatonia. Everyone was gone and Priyahnka Kapoor, having lived in solitude for many, many lifetimes felt for the first time that she was entirely alone. Worst of all, she had no idea how to save a single one of them. As though some remnant of her Master had seen her thoughts as clear as day, Gehrman, still stroking her hand and staring at her croons, "You'll get used to it." 

She snatches her hand away quickly at that, cradles it to her heart and refuses to shed tears. Priyahnka hustles down the steps on the Workshop. She has to help Gascoigne, and to do that, she must help Master Gehrman. There is no time for crying. There is only time for planning and action. She kneels at the Grave, with Yharnham inscribed on the stone and tries not to feel the presence of her own tombstone as she is whisked away.


	6. Playing Catch-Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We catch up with some important NPCs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A reworking of chapters seven and nine, smooshed into the next chapter i was working on. We meet, three NPCs today and Priyahnka isn't happy about any of it.

He is not the first person she meets,but she will give him credit for being the liveliest.  
  
When she first sees the man that calls himself Alfred he is praying, alone, at a shrine. it isn't much like the the small figure of Chandra she brought to Yharnahm and set near Gascoinge's and then Henryk's hearth. It feels very different. The single raised Tombstone is mostly unremarkable: A name, a set of dates, a single line epitaph. The only notable thing was how lifeless the stone appeared.  
  
The grey hue seemed incredibly cold, even just to look at despite the candles flaming brightly. The wilted vines in the statue rising up being the tombstone seemed misplaced, as though they found their way there by accident before being drained off life before they could escape back from whence they came. While the stone draws her eye it is the hunched figure of a man bowed in the peculiar manner of Yharnham prayer that secures her attention. Yharnham's temples, called Cathedrals, had always had midnight mass-goers among the weeds long after the doors had been sealed and the BloodSaints and Vicars set themselves to sleep. She had been dead during some of the construction and most of the use of this particular one, but she'd hazard a guess that it was still the same. Despite all that, the person kneeling is unique in their singularity.  
  
The last time she had seen them she had left him well enough alone. She, in her addled state, hadn't been able to guess at their state of mind.  She had been wounded, passing through and seeking refuge in any building that would have her after her fight with.....with......well, after a fight. A hostile encounter would have been disastrous so she had sidled on by with nary a word of interruption for his, or perhaps her, praying.Priyahnka steps forwards, lightly.  Now, however, Priyahnka Kapoor was no injured, helpless fish flopped up onto the sand. Now Priyahnka stands and waits patiently for this sickly pale person to finish their prayer and show themselves.    
  
The wind blows and the flames of the candles shudder and fade as the paying man rises. and turns. His face is long, but not the longest she's ever seen. His facial hair frames his features, in that way Yharnham men fancy though the rest of his hair seems loose and almost disregarded.  He wears a common nose, though it was perhaps not so common in Yharnham, with eyes that seem somewhat dreamy as they look her up and down. They seem to offer little in the way of judgment as they behold her donned RifleSpear and cape-turned-Sari.  
  
Priyahnka presses her palms together and bows. "Namaste" He doesn't respond in words, instead choosing to  bow deeply at the waist and  clasp his hands together with elbows bowed outwards. She had been prepared to find just the response of a sane man acceptable but his bow, a traditional church bow remembered from digging Healing Church graves and watching church members scurry about, brings her some measure of comfort.  
  
 "You're a hunter, aren't you." he begins. Well, she was, and she's hunting something now and she supposes it's close enough. At her short nod he continues, "I knew it. That's precisely how I started out!" He  smiles at her, unexpectedly bright in the faded candle light. For a long moment she can feel the difference in their expressions, his cheerful beam conflicting against her dour rictus. "Oh, beg pardon," he chuckles," you may call me Alfred. Protege of Master Logarius, hunter of Vilebloods. So, what say you? Our prey might differ, but we are hunters, the both of us. Why not cooperate, and discuss the things we've learned?"  
  
  
Priyahnka discovers two things that night. Firstly she discovers that there is a man in Cathedral Ward by the name of Alfred that prays to a statue and a grave.Secondly, she discovers that she isn't very fond of Alfred, protege of Logarius. He is amiable enough, but like the stone he worships at he seems flat, somehow, lifeless. There is a wrongness to his eyes that even a smile cannot erase. Lack of affection notwithstanding he makes for a veritable fount of information. Perhaps he can be of use in her quest to  make use of Wilhelm's teachings about eyes. But first she needs to know more about Brygenwerth. Heretofore Priyahnka had known of Byrgenwerth but without any depth. Alfred knows a fair bit despite his modest claims of being a "simple hunter, quite unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the institution."  
  
"Byrgenwerth is an old place of learning. And the tomb of the gods, carved out below Yharnam, should be familiar to every hunter."  
  
"Tomb?" she asks guilelessly. Of course she had known of the Pthumerian Tombs. She was well aware of the source of the blood and of that strange sword Ludwig and gotten from them. Her garb had originally been made for those that explored that labyrinth, for goodness sake. It still didn't mean she could turn down an opportunity to have someone present her with all they knew about it. Any knowledge was good knowledge.  
  
"You do not know of the Tomb of the Gods? Then allow me to elucidate you on this matter. Upon the founding of Yharnham, many odd things were discovered, strange rock formations, unnatural behavior from animals, and the like. Eventually it was discovered that under the fledgling town, there was a great tomb of unclear origin. Well, once a group of young Byrgenwerth scholars discovered a holy medium deep within the tomb. This led to the founding of the Healing Church, and the establishment of Blood Healing."  
  
 "But today, the college lies deep within a tangled wood, abandoned and decrepit. And furthermore, the Healing Church has declared Byrgenwerth forbidden ground. It's unclear how many of its scholars remain alive...but only they know the password that allows passage through the gate." Having been there fairly recently Priyahnka can see why.  
  
The release of information regarding the existence of beasts in Yharnham had been carefully planned, she was quite sure, and all that went into it was a complicated thing full of danger and cross-hairs to stand in, like the interactions of the many gods. It happened gradually and the information spread was very limited. Therefore, Priyahnka could easily think of many reasons why unrestricted access to the old college of Byrgenwerth was forbidden.  The nature of its scholars' very forms alone would have caused a great panic to erupt in the city. However Yharnham more closely resembled Asurya Lokas now, rather than any human city.  
  
"Was Logarius a scholar of Byrgenwerth?" She could not truly imagine that he was or else Alfred would not be so eager to be his protege. But every avenue must be explored, despite its unlikeliness. She would upturn every stone to help Gehrman, and thus Gascoigne.  
  
"To know of Master Logarius you must know of the Corrupted Vilebloods," he sneers. His pleasant expression folds inwards on itself as anger wells behind his teeth. Priyahnka at once becomes very glad that she did not deign to sit as she listened to him. She might need to move and very quickly, at that.  
  
 "Once, a scholar betrayed his fellows at Byrgenwerth...and brought forbidden blood back with him to Cainhurst Castle. It was there that the first of the inhuman Vilebloods was born." Priyahnka assesses him as his bristles quietly, like an angered dog. Alfred's gloved hand clenches and she can see it trembling with the force of his emotions. "The Vilebloods are fiendish creatures who threaten the purity of the Church's blood healing." Given what she knows of the Healing Church's methods there is very little purity to speak of in it but she wisely does not tell him so. "The Ruler of the Vilebloods is still alive today. And so, to honor my master's wishes, I search, for the path to Cainhurst Castle."  
  
"His wishes?"  
  
"In his time, Master Logarius led his executioners into Cainhurst Castle to cleanse it of the Vilebloods. But all did not go well and Master Logarius became a blessed anchor, guarding us from evil...Tragic, tragic times...that Master Logarius should be abandoned in the accursed domain of the Vilebloods." There was still fury in him, yes, but now there was more sorrow than anything else. Even if she did not hold with him any affection, Priyahnka could see the suffering of another like her. Perhaps Alfred was beholden to Logarius for some manner of kindness or perhaps it was simply the esteem of a man for a superior he had never met but had heard much about. “I must free him, so that he may be properly honored in martyrdom.”  
  
“I see,” she  responds to the impassioned silence his words leave behind. Priyahnka does see. She sees him more clearly than he sees himself. She sees both of them, trapped in this domain and knows that they may never shed these earthly attachments. It would be a long time before either of them attained enlightened perfection. As she takes her leave of him Priyahnka considers that at least she knows what she's in for. That poor man probably has no idea.  
  
Well. _She's_ not about to tell him.  
  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
The first time she and Eileen the Crow cross paths Priyahnka is a newborn, only fifteen minutes old.  
  
Priyahnka is also brainless and confused. Priyahnka looks up at her, this woman garbed from head to toe in darkness made solid. She can still feel where her palms gripped tightly around a gift given by the curious little beings that had been on the steps of the Hunter's Dream. A twinkle distracts her and, bowing quickly at the stranger, she leans her head over the tall railing of the Yharnham Sewers searching it out. The Huntress of Hunters offers her a gift and is thanked with a smile. Priyahnka  listens to this stranger with the fog of rebirth swimming in her head.  
  
She listens. She leaves. She does not see her again for some time.  
  
When Priyahnka meets Eileen the crow for the second time she is newly born, only a three hours old. Having run out of supplies, she turns to previously conquered places to harvest blood only to find herself beset by the hunter of hunters.  
  
"Your blood is mine! A hunter's blood for me! Your punishment is death! Death to hunters!"  
  
Priyahnka swings on reflex and is met with the visage of a terrible crow. Priyahnka's RifleSpear is is wickedly sharp but it does her no good because she cannot. Hit. The! HUNTRESS!  
  
The Huntress cannot Quicken herself like Priyahnka can but it hardly seems to matter. Eileen moves like a serpent across the echoing stone of the cathedral and lashes out in gleaming sweeps with her crooked blade. Priyahnka strikes out at the rabid woman only to miss by an infuriating hairsbreadth. She knows what is coming as she loses sight of her foe before she can recover. She chokes on her agony as curved metal pierces her flesh. Priyahnka crumples into the dusty, blood mottled stone.  
  
Priyahnka awakens to lamplight and shakes away the lingering stiffness of death. She had not expected an opponent out of the woman but in hindsight it was nothing short of naive. The myriad twisted forms of the former civilians and church guards fall like threshed grass beneath her blade as Priyahnka cuts a path back towards the crow woman.  
  
Priyahnka falls and rises and falls and rises again. The crow woman is a more difficult opponent than she expected and she is becoming frustrated. She was still low on vials blood, lower now than she was when she first encountered Eileen's blade, and she had been struck down more than enough times. It was becoming wearying.  
  
Priyahnka does not deign to strike down the creatures on her path as she makes her way back to the cavernous church. The incense smoke around them swirls like a great storm cloud. Her strike blocks Eileen's blade as it comes towards her but Priyahnka does not move quickly enough to avoid the second blow that lops off her head. For a moment she swears that she can see the mad hunter from the graveyard.  
  
All is black.  
  
Priyahnka  awakens, flat on her back and one arm outstretched for someone who isn't there. She lays a long while, gazing up at the golden-warm light of the lamp, the corroded silver bells that hang on it by a rusted chain length, the scant moths that swim through the air around it in circles. Their dusted wings flutter and flap about as they glide around the  lantern. They move like the half forgotten hands of women who practiced their dances on the beach at night, with all the sea as an audience. One of the moths ends its dance by throwing itself against the lantern glass. The soft corpse lands next to her, a comrade in death. Priyahnka turns her head and plucks if from the stones and considers it sharply as she hold it above her.  
  
She licks the thumb of her free hand and runs it over the tiny corpse as she murmurs prayers. Once she's gotten all of it she can, and moth-wing dust in her eye besides, Priyahnka raises herself to her feet, cradling the moth in her calloused palm. She draws forth a piece of fire paper from between her sari and ravike, wraps it gently around the insect and sets it alight. Now her fellow in death has had a funeral. One of the remaining moths flies towards the tiny pyre and is caught in its flames. It goes up almost faster than the fire paper itself. Priyahnka snorts and laughs a bitter laugh as she thinks, that must have been his wife.  
  
She is almost to the church steps again when she wonders if that moth's sacrifice was pious enough to release her soul from the endless cycle. She suspects that it wasn't,but she hopes that in this she is wrong. She peers up the stairs at the smoky interior of the Cathedral and hopes.  
  
Priyahnka turns away.  
  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
Priyahnka is two hours into another life when she meets Eileen again. Priyahnka is free from the fog her last rebirth had left. Her mind is finally hers and it is all there. Priyahnka had chosen to stay away from the sewers to avoid another confrontation with the Crow but fate apparently has other plans.

Eileen has a target and asks her to stay away from the Tomb below Oedon Chapel. Priyahnka is still bitter enough about her continued defeat by her hands to go directly there, just to spite her in this petty way.  
  
When she gets there the first thing she hears is Screaming.  
  
It is not a beast's roar or the chittering noises of the grey skinned creatures. No. It rings out through the silent of the night like a Ghanta Bell.  It is a cry of anguish. Anguish so strong it is indistinguishable from pain. The sounds feels like a pull on one's very life force. More importantly it sounds like Henryk  
.  
Priyahnka sprints down the stairs with a quickness. If it is Henryk, then he needs her help. If it's not then she is going to find whatever is making that noise and make them stop one way or another. She can't imagine that it'll truly be him. He was already older than Gascoigne when she died and Gascoigne had been grey when she... She still cannot say killed, She still cannot think killed. He had been older in any case. But she makes it to the Tomb of Oden, where she last saw Gascoigne amidst the graves she dug and the tombstones she erected.  
  
Priyahnka pauses, wavers, trembles. It is Henryk. He is alive and still human. He is wailing.  
  
"Gascoigne," he is crying. "No, Gascoigne, awaken, I beg of you!" She can't see if tears roll down his face as he clutches at the bloody, shredded remains of a coat. She can't tell because her own tears obscure the scene in front of her. She can't stop crying as he wails and stumbles in circles amidst the tombstones.  
  
"No! Gascoigne, my Friend," he cries. Henryk clutches the torn coat to his chest and screams that awful scream. She sobs quietly as he wails the wails that Priyahnka cannot allow herself to wail on her own. Henryk shakes and jerks when he walks. Having been a gravedigger and furthermore having dug a sizeable number of the Graves here, Priyhanka could attest to the looseness of the soil and the treachery of so many tombstones underfoot. The gnarled roots poking up from the ground are new but cannot possibly make things any better. It still alarms  her when he stumbles and falls to one knee.  
  
The gasp she releases is the spark in Djura's proverbial powder-keg. Even in grief-madness, Henryk can hear as well as any other long lived hunter. His head snaps up to the stair on which Priyahnka stands. Any tears end as their eyes meet. She had not seen Henryk when she had first reawakened in Yharnham, deluded and confused. She wonders now, how much of a mercy that was. His yellow hunting garb is faded from the full afternoon sun on ones face to the last dying rays of light, faded and forgotten. There is grief in he eyes and there is rage, too.  
  
She cannot hear it at first, his garb covers his mouth, his voice is weak, but he says it again and again until he is screaming.  
  
"I'm Sorry," he wails. "I've failed you all." He raises his hands as if in supplication and rips the mask and hat from his face. If she wasn't frozen before the shock would have done so then. His age is apparent on his face, but not nearly so much as it should have been. He cannot be older than fifty, but Gascoigne was so young yet when that beast killed her and he is grey and weary, but Henryk is...  
  
Henryk casts the hat and mask on top of Gascoigne's Coat. As the hat rolls off it takes his blood with it. Priyahnka half tracks it as it tumbles. Faded sunshine and well worn darkness and blood on top of all of it.  
Henryk, who outlived Herself and Gascoigne and His dear wife and their stillborn children all, comes towards her. He is not as fast as Gehrman or even as fast as her. Not by a long shot. Still, when his graceless stumble ramps up into a full blown run at her from across the graveyard she doesn't move. She isn't afraid or tired, just still and silent as the grave.  
  
He is very nearly to her when something drops from sky, like Gehrman did, so long ago. This time she is not mistaken about that creature being a great bird, it is Eileen the Crow.  In a flash of silver the Crow strikes, sending Henryk reeling back from the blow. She lashes out again and again in a pattern she has been at the receiving end of many times. Henryk dashes around her as best he can, dodging and hopping about. He doesn't attack her, just runs around her. She attempts to strike him only to be tripped as he swings his saw cleaver backwards in a move Priyahnka has seen a thousand times on a thousand nights. With Eileen out the way he sprints back towards Priyahnka.  
  
Galvanized by the threat, he is much quicker this time. He still only makes it to the stairs when Eileen stabs him through the back. He jolts forwards as the blade punches through his chest. His eyes fill with tears as he releases a long, anguished whine. The silver sword comes away with a thick, meaty rasping noise. Henryk doubles over the moment Eileen backs away from him. He doesn't relent, though. Henryk gasps and gurgles, dragging himself forwards. The blood leaking out of his chest and his mouth mingle on the stairs. With his last breaths kind Henryk reaches his hand out to Priyahnka, apologies and self recriminations written in his eyes. He cannot make it there on his own and she knows it.  
  
Priyahnka takes a step forwards. then another.  
  
One final step forwards and Henryk, choking and shaking with unfocused eyes, clutches her ankle. His grip is absolute in its strength. Priyahnka can feel the neat stitching on his gloves pressing into her skin through her thin leather shoes. Even even his final moments he is crying in grief for Gascoigne, for Viola for their children, for her. He hisses out something. She cannot hear it but she knows very well what Henryk is saying.The faded sunshine glove loosens and falls away. So does Henryk.  
  
 It isn't _fair_. Priyahnka could cry but she is far beyond tears. Her anger will not allow them. It isn't fair that the only one who recognized her had to die! It wasn't fair the Henryk had to outlive everyone! He deserved better! Priyhanka furiously decides that she will make sure he gets what he deserves.  
  
All around Priyahnka, the muted colors of the Tomb of Oedon fall away. She can see Eileen the Crow watching her as she begins to sway. Eileen begins to speak, but all sound  is suddenly so far away, so very silent. Priyahnka is so cold, she can't move. She is distantly aware of Eileen darting forward to catch her as she pitches forwards.  
  
Priyahnka awakens in the fetal position, under the dim light of a weathered lamp adorned with corroded silver bells. She can already feel the darkness, just outside her circle of light, leeching away the warm of a restful sleep. Her right arm aches furiously. her hand is clutching the base of the lamp as if to never let go. It takes some doing, but she finally convinces her fingers to work. Priyahnka grabs her aching hand with the other and sets about easing its pain. She is nearly finished when she notices her gloves are marked. It isn't unusual to receive marks while hunting, but to awaken under the lamps changed was new and deeply concerning.  
  
It is a small mark. It is long and criss-crossed like stitches and dotted with holes as though it were a child's first work. She removes her left glove to trace the pattern with her bare skin. It is immediately familiar. Any of the lamp's warmth is gone. It is the stitching on Henryk's gloves.  
  
Half curled on the ground, she sits there, looking at it for a Very Long Time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *murti - a small figure or framed picture of the god or being the shrine is worshipping  
> *chandra is a vedic diety of the moon and the lord of plants and vegitation. He's described as beautiful but an asshole who stole someone else's wife (literally stole her, kidnapping-style) and got semi banished for it, married all 27 of another god's daughters, which he was only allowed to do because he promised he wouldn't show favoritism, he broke that promise and got cursed for it, laughed at another god being injured and got one of his tusks broken off for it and cursed again. Dude was a pretty boy drunken asshole, kind of like that rich asshole dude in every 80's movie. Considering all the lunar symbolism, drunkeness translating into blood drunkeness and history of fucked up attempts at love ending in pregnancies with arguably bad results, i figured he was the perfect god for Priyahnka to have in her household shrine.  
> Asurya lokas (demonic words) -once you die there are multiple levels of heavens and hells where the jiva( which is something like a soul) goes in between lives to learn and experience things before coming back to earth. Asurya lokas are the hell side of things where chaos and suffering rule.  
> http://www.hinduwebsite.com/reincarnation.asp
> 
>  
> 
> Odissi is traditional dance that originated in Odisha, a costal state of India. England tried to squash it whlie they were being dicks to everyone on the sub-continent but it survived. The women refrenced were practicing in a mostly deserted area at fuck-o-clock in the morning/night.  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odissi  
> you can watch a performance here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mORxYC6bGp0  
> The Sari is the long wrap that goes around the shoulders and waist. The Ravike is the shirt under it and the skirt has a lot of names, given Lakshadweep's location I'm going with Shaya.  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sari&oldid=734498147
> 
> Priyahnka is refrencing the illegal practice of Sati/Suttee aka Wife/widow Burning. When a man died the widow would sometimes burn themselves on their husband's funeral pyre, be buried with their corpse, drown themselves, etc. It was seen as an act of devotion and might have been an escape for widowed women, as widows were shunned and seen as failed wives.  
> http://www.kashgar.com.au/articles/life-in-india-the-practice-of-sati-or-widow-burning
> 
> The Ghanta is a brass bell outside of temples that people ring when they go in.  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghanta


	7. Kill Your Darlings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gaze into the Abyss

The grave feels colder every time she sees it. It grabs more of the air around it until the very sight of it begins attempting to steal her warmth away. She does her best to not look at it but that doesn't deter it. Frustrated and spiteful, she attempts to stare it down as if to force it back into submissive quietude.  
  
The top of it is pointed like the windows of the cathedrals in Yharnham, pointing up into an endless night. The stone is faded and dull,the engraving, indistinguishable. The tree behind it is already raising its roots upwards, causing the stone to lean backwards a bit, as if staring upwards at the sky, willfully ignoring its owner-it is hers, isn't it?- glaring at it intensely. Priyahnka is shaken with how aware it feels. As though it is innocently staring up at the cloudless sky but most certainly watching her of the corner of its eye. The cold is seeping in through the layer of dense protection her hair provides her neck and brushes the skin there in a gesture somewhere between warning and tease. Priyahnka does not let up. Her gaze is more lasting than any mere rock and she will show that to it. her pride would demand nothing less of her.  
  
Priyahnka grimly marches closer to the gravestone. The ground underfoot shifts as though deterring her intentionally but she refuses to pay it any heed. She has chosen this path and she will follow through if it kills her. The biting cold increases as she draws nearer. Still unblinking, Priyahnka flinches back as she feels the skin of her bare arms break open liked the dried bank of a dead river, like a cracked water jar. The blood that rolls down her arm stings like fire.   
  
She cannot, will not back away from this. She cannot allow anything least of all this simple stone, to have a hold on her if she is to save Gascoigne or Gehrman or Henryk or even herself. the thought enrages her beyond telling. That Gascoigne's life should be subject to the whims of a mere stone was abominable.    
  
She takes another step and the breath is stolen from her lungs. Her nose is bleeding now, dripping red down the front of her corpse-pilfered  garb. If her eyes do not bleed yet they will soon, for the biting cold of the tombstone gives no quarter to her challenge. Priyahnka resorts to using Healing Blood to repair the damage done and solider through. She is close now, she will defeat this accursed rock.  
  
 _Come_. it says, _Your eyes mean nothing. your warmth is mine, now. come and take what is yours if you can,girl._  
  
By the time she can touch the headstone the trail of blood she leaves on the steps of the Dream is longer than she is tall. Her blood is spent and she is close, so close. Priyahnka is scant inches from the headstone when she collapses backwards.  The Maria -faced puppet watches blankly as Priyahnka  stares into the open sky and chokes on her own blood. Her soul feels the cold grip of the Dream take her.  
  
 _Too bad, Maybe next time,_ sneers the mocking hiss of her own headstone.

  
\---------------------------------  
\---------------------------------  
  
The air is thickly perfumed with incense from the varied censers that litter the echoing center of the Oedon Chapel. The strange man still sits there. He sways on the spot, as if pushed and pulled by the faint night breeze, eyes unseeing. Delicatly he holds his hands out as if to let them sift through the smoke of incense that curls heavy against the ground. He is happy now, dreaming of a friendship after the night ends.  
  
Priyahnka doesn't care much one way or the other. She's willing to give him a chance, she supposes. His pallid and withered appearance reminds her of children, locked away in basements or disobedient daughters she had seen on her travels. Broken and wailing in rooms separated from the rest of their families. One child had been caught stealing from an uncle who took them in, she recalls hearing through the gaps in the wooden slats of a tiny box, and his arms had been broken in punishment and had never hung right again. It was a terrible waste to injure a child like that, ruining them from any further use and chancing their death in the process. When she tore open the box and freed him, he repaid her with information; the comings and goings of the local bandits, useful plants and some womens' clothes he had stored away before his punishment. They traveled together for two nights before they separated, leaving memories of sallow skin and disfigurement.   
  
This peculiar temple watcher, however, wasn't going to be traveling anywhere anytime soon, least of all on this night. Perhaps he would find some way to repay her later for the favor she had performed. "I know I shouldn't be askin' you," it had pleaded quietly, face adorned with a wary smile, fingernails scraping the floor almost imperceptibly. "But... If you happen upon someone while hunting, tell 'em about this here Oedon Chapel. If they seem worth being told that is... Oh, and I do sincerely hope they are... Hee hee.."  
  
She had done as the cathedral dweller had asked. Ever door that gave an answer to her purposeful knocks had been advised of the Oedon Chapel's safety. Every fearful whimper and utterances of damnation had been heard and hushed.  "Seek Oedon Chapel,"  Priyahnka had urged those that would listen and many more that would not. Some people had come, some had not. Gilbert, unable to move, and unwilling to unlock his refuge long enough for Priyahnka to slip inside and carry him there, had remained behind. Gascoigne's child had agreed to come and never did, though it was apparent that Gascoigne's residence now stood bereft of her tiny presence.  
  
Priyahnka looks around, very few had made it to the Cathedral under their own power. A whore, an elderly woman and a single man. Less than the occupancy of a single household had managed to make it. It seems that the population of Yharnhamites that could be reasoned with is at an all time low. Fewer still were the numbers that was hale enough to traverse the rancid city streets.  
  
Priyahnka thinks back to cruel and hateful civilians. She remembers malicious whispers. She feels the ghost of spit hitting her calves from phantom Yharnhamites in stiff pants and stifling dresses. She recalls the way Gascoigne laughed in the noonday sun with some faceless neighbor Her eyes lift from memory to the place and time around her, drowned in smoke and ruins and stinking of blood.   
  
Priyahnka scowls.  
  
What a waste.  
  
\---------------------------  
\---------------------------  
  
The ellusive college of Beygynwerth is as much a disaster when she arrives as it was on her last visit, The corridors are in shambles, carefully copied texts lay strewn about, dampened by purulence of an indescribable nature. The students here, more similar to the slugs they wielded than the humans they once were throw themselves at her, slow and clumsy. Priyahnka kills most of them, shedding their watery blood in great floods as she traverses the dilapidated halls.   
  
Only once does Priyahnka see a fellow human. They lock eyes across the balcony on the second floor. They are too far away to make out distinguishing features, but she does not need to know what color their eyes are to feel them boring into her. Priyahnka bows silently. The stranger responds in kind. Priyahnka does not let her eyes stray from the stranger as she resumes her text collection. She bends down to pick up a book, eyes still plastered to the figure across the way. Eventually the figure leaves, going through the door to the Mensis Nightmare and Priyahnka returns to pilfering all the knowledge there is to be had from the ruined bowels of the college of Byrgenwerth.  
  
In the end the spoils of her fervent hunt are barely more than nothing. The hunter's dream is littered with books, falling from leaning stacks or tossed aside carelessly. Old texts about the movements of the planets and the imagined machinations of the stars mingle with How To Pick Up Fair Maidens in a great tangled heap. The sorting is slow and tedious, livened only by an occasional toss of a heavier book into the lap of the husk of her former teacher. She finds a few with Gehrman's name on them. Those she sets aside, on the desk. Maybe Gehrman will read them while she is gone and breathe some life into his faded memory.  
  
The books that seem the most useful are full of complicated words that she never learned and the foul whisperings of those gone to madness. Priyahnka considers that she would probably be better off letting that crazed man wearing a cage shout into her ear for a while. Only one of the books seems to be worth anything more than the parchment it is written on. Brown and red with a gilt eye on the binding, it fits in the circle of her arms like it was always meant to be there. Only  some of the pages are filled in, sketches and a strange language randomly dotted throughout the pages. Interspersed is the writing of home, of Lakshadweep, in fragments telling a horrific tale. Sketches of beasts and diagrams of stars and a portrait in the very back.

  
It is the portrait of a woman that no longer was. the familiar face, devoid of eyes and half rotted away, peers out at her from the page. She's a little curious as to how she was discovered, but mostly she is angry that someone dragged her mother's corpse out of the sea.  
  
\---------------------------  
  
 The vastly oversized doors of the graveyard open slowly and with no fanfare for the single woman that ambles through their gaping maw.   
  
Priyahnka runs through the rotted streets of Old Yharnham with the ease borne of great familiarity. The crumbled cobblestones and aged plaster fall to dust as she ghosts through the sprawling labyrinth of desiccated streets. Multiple times she nearly runs straight into the stone faces of buildings erected while she was dead, moving on the memory of a world long since destroyed under the crushing weight of time. The need for a superior vantage point and the strange flashing she can see draws her to the Old Yharnham clock tower like the tide is drawn to the shore.  
  
A few beasts scurry away at the sight of her. Priyahnka's stride slows but does not cease. She considers the oddity, brow furrowed. She was so used to beasts throwing themselves at her in mindless blood-lust that the sudden materialization of the pointed opposite was the third most confusing part of the whole experience. She reaches the clock tower and begins to climb.  
  
Still, it's not her problem now, she reasons on her way up the stone edifice. She has bigger things to deal with. It was not like they possessed the reasoning to plan anything. She pauses in her assent and considers, 'what if?" She resumes climbing, but faster.  
  
At the top Priyhanka hesitates before raising herself into landing above. Last time she had gone up a ladder, a bipedal creature with a masonry brick in its meaty fist knocked her off her feet and she had fallen two and a half stories into a sewer.  The clock tower was a great deal higher than two stories and she didn't think she had enough Healing Blood to recover from that. Even if she could just reawaken at a lamp, perfectly fine, death is never a pleasant experience. Apprehensively, she raises her off hand from its position on the ladder and, raising it high above her and above the safety of the ladder, she closes her eyes and braces herself. When no blow comes she retracts it and loops her arm around the rung of the ladder tightly. With her free hand she raises her RifleSpear, blade up above her head and after a moment waves it. Wariness appeased, Pryahnka settles the weapon back in its rightful place on her back and slowly raises her head above the edge.  
  
A man sits there,cross legged and seemingly sleeping with a hat tipped over his face. She doesn't trust that as far as she can throw him and she can't throw very much very far.The stranger wears ragged clothes, torn again and again in various places, repair work making up most of the garb. Ragged hat, ragged pants, everything ragged and bleached nearly white, like ashes, or bones the ocean spews forth.He is leaning against some sort of outlandish contraption. She isn't sure what's she's looking at as she examines it from the dubious safety of the ladder. The night air stirs as she raises herself another rung up the ladder. The man, turns towards her, giving up the pretense of sleep entirely,when Priyahnka sees it swing on a cord around his neck; a vial full of black powder, seal lined in gold.  
  
"Are you Powder Keg?" The ragged man jolts as through struck. sending his hat tumbling to the floor. His already focused attention refines itself to needle sharpness as he stands and looks squarely down at her. If he were a beast Priyahnka imagines she could see his hackles risen in the air, but he yet remains a man and a silent man, at that. Tired of their exchange going nowhere, Priyahnka decides that he's had plenty of opportunity to attack her and decides the risk is worth the relief of being off that ladder. The ladder creaks just a bit as she  comes to a stop on the landing.  It isn't until Priyahnka is closer, prepared to bow and introduce herself, that she can make out the the eyes of a kind young man, eyes that were old far before their time.  
  
"Djura!?"  
  
"Priyahnka?!"  
  
Priyahnka was not expecting that. To be fair, Djura wasn't expecting to see her either. Her being dead for a while seemed to do that for people.  
  
"You were dead," he says grimly and still in shock. The moment stretches on. Djura raises his hand s though to reach out and touch her only to pull it back down to his side. There is nowhere for him to lean, up on his tower, besides the side of his powerful gun, so he sits against the side of it. Priyahnka does the same. where Djura's descent had been executed dexterously it had carried the air of aged carefulness and just the hint of a creak in his legs.  Priyahnka's was still smooth and silent and youthful. She noticed the contrast but wasn't sure whether or not to attribute it to advanced age or to simple shock.   
  
It's shock, she decides as she looks over to see Djura's gape mouthed, incredulous gaze. Quite frankly his expression was one of the few things she fond amusing ever since she had been born in Iosefka's clinic. She decides not to tell him so. It probably wouldn't help him get over it any faster. Day-dreaming Djura wasn't a tenderheart or easily prone to shocks. Instead he weathered blows like stone, and held himself up like stone. and now he is shattering like stone. Priyahnka turns her gaze back out into the Yharnham night and pretends not to hear him breaking apart in great crumbling slabs . Djura doesn't hesitate to touch her when Priyahnka silently sets her hand into his lap. The touch is firm and fearless, the sobs and shocked laughter are not.  
  
Though the night is not silent, like it was then, She calls to mind sitting behind the hunter's workshop with him like this once. The late summer night had been cool then. all shadows and gentle winds. This night cannot seem to stay one way, going from flush with leaves and summer heat to  abyssal winter chill to solemn autumn winds, changing like the tides. Absently she can't recall if she ever saw it rain in Yharnham. She has a lot of questions, many of them about Yharnham. She frowns gently and clenches her hand around the fingers pressing questingly into her palm.  
  
"Djura," Priyahnka swallows heavily. "What happened?"  
  
There is a long moment of silence before he begins to speak.  What he says horrifies her in ways only a truth that is long unchangeable can. The night she and Henryk had gone out the hunt, that night that had been her last, had turned out to be quite busy by the end of it.   
  
_____________________  
  
While Priyahnka and her compatriot had been chasing down that beast, Old Yharnham had been writhing with infestation and the hunters of the Healing Church Workshop had been instructed to lance the boil that was Old Yharnham, by any means necessary.   
  
Old Yharnham, home to beasts and humans alike had been burned to the ground while her back was turned. Barely past sunset, the hunters of the Healing Church Workshop had begun skittering in the background of the evening, placing oil barrels, weapons, gunpowder. Shrouded in the thick darkness of the night Ludwig and his cohorts barricaded as much as the could and set the town alight. Everything, men, women children, animals, beasts and all, went screaming through the night as the fire fed upon them and tore the flesh from bones and the people from their flesh. Little over half of the Powder Keg died in the fires, immolated in the ashes of their own homes. With the smoldering fires still smoking as she listens, Priyahnka can almost hear the endless cries of terror and pain. She can't find it in herself to be grateful that the resulting nausea can't find anything in her stomach to bring up.That would have been terrible enough, but she finds he has more to tell her..  
   
A hunter would know very well how Beasthood happened after long enough if they weren't completely dimwitted.  Well, dimwitted or purposefully ignorant. Once you knew even half of the details it becomes apparent that Healing Blood is the catalyst that lets a man's inner beast consume him. The problem was that most of the beasts they had seen were from the weak willed or the frail on body, those that gobbled down blood and asked for more. Beasthood was something that could be avoided through strength of character and careful applications of warding metals and sigils.   
  
That night took care of plenty of misconceptions for all of the Hunters when Ludwig, the pinnacle of Healing Church Hunting perfection saw the fires of Old Yharnham burning brightly as the sun and fell prey to the blood in his veins that laid in wait for years. Ludwig began violently attacking anything within his reach, killing more than a few men before whatever was left of him took his sword and impaled himself.  
  
At the same time in the upper echelons of the Choir, Lawrence, leader of the Healing Church, most important single man in all of Yharnham, began to transform into a Cleric Beast. A quarter of the choir was destroyed as he tore his way out of the building and rained terror on everything in his path before a hunter cut him down and tore him apart. With Lawrence's skull on an altar the already factured Healing church lost all sense of direction and things went downhill rapidly after that.  
  
"I left the life of hunting very soon after," Djura admits quietly. "I kept an eye out for your Gascoigne, but couldn't - I couldn't keep looking at our diseased brethren as though they were destined for nothing more than the slaughter." The grip around her fingers tightens just a tiny bit more.  
  
"Your fishing beasts."  
  
"Hm?"  
  
"When last we spoke, you had hunted a beast that used to be a fisherman. You were upset because it kept trying to fish."  
  
"Ah. Hmmm, yes. My fishing beast indeed." Priyahnka opens her mouth to ask how long it's been since they last spoke when the clods part and the smoke make way for the moon to shine down on them, sitting on the top of a clock. In the glow of moonlight she recalls a passage in a Byrgenwerth text. She sees the gaping gaze of her mother rendered in pencil on a manuscript. She feels the pattern Henryk left on her as he died. Her mouth opens and closes with a swallow.  
  
"Djura." Priyahnka lets his hand go to grip his shoulder firmly. Priyahnka's eyes bore into Djura's sky blue ones with all the gravity they can hold."Djura, do you trust me?"  
\----------------------------  
  
Djura screams behind the hand Priyahnka has clamped over his mouth. He only screams a little, to his credit. Djura's arms flail in his panic. The right one collides with her head and stays there, gripping her hair dangerously tight. She can't fault him as the wind tears at their locked eyes and pulls at their clothes. If she weren't prepared to go tumbling over the edge of a clock tower, if she had just been stabbed in the heart by a trusted friend returned from the dead, she would be scared too.  
\----------------------------  
  
Priyahnka breathes.   
  
Priyahnka is breathing, she has to be, there's no way she would be standing there if she were not breathing. but,still, she can't feel the air coming and going in and out of her lungs, or the earth beneath her feet or world around her. All of that is unimportant as her eyes gaze upon a....a god? A god she has never seen named or heard celebrated? Perhaps it is simply a monster.   
  
But it speaks. lowly into her ears, no her very soul, it w h i s p e r s. The things it whispers are terror incarnate  and the feeling of suffocation under the power of a greater being.It feels welcome and and smothering. The Being twists and turns as well yet it is perfectly still. One cannot be that still without not breathing. It is the stillness of a corpse, more unnatural even than Micolash's exalted puppets in the Mensis Nightmare. Is this what they had worshiped and loved and pilfered from, those of Brygenwerth and Mensis and the Healing Church?  Distantly she can recall the sound of Lawrence's voice and the reverence it lavished upon the words 'Great Ones' Blood'  in a long ago conversation with some nameless figure. Priyahnka would think quite pointedly that she was fairly certain that the Great Ones did no love them back regardless of their devoted worship If she had the ability to think of anything but the Creature in front of her  
  
Priyahnka is surrounded, now. Where there had been emptiness before, there was the Being now.

 

It swallows her whole

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gaze into the grave and it gazes back into you.   
> Want to make on omelette? Gotta crack some Eggs.  
> Want to save your soul? Gotta die.  
> Want to save your friends? Well, that's gonna take some doing,
> 
> (things that died; priyahnka, her mom, most of her city, Gilbert, Gascoigne's daughter, Djura)


	8. Honoring Wishes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Priyahnka runs the hunters dream.

The hunter's been coming in for a while now. He's a fearful thing,more than most,and querulous besides. Always prattling on about this and that. Chattering endlessly until he suddenly clams up like an emptied purse, eyes wide with some insipid fear.  
  
She had welcomed him to the hunter's dream, the same as any other. Like her teacher before her, she invited him to use anything he could find in the workshop, with a gentle admonition to be careful with Gascoigne. With no more than a moments hesitation he had scuttered out the door and down the steps of the workshop and asked "Are you Gascoigne, then?"  
  
Priyahnka could hear the soulless silence rising above the soft hush of waves stretching on for a long minute.  
  
"Why won't you answer me?" he beseeched, like a child denied a toy. That had been her first encounter with that particular hunter and it wasn't her favorite meeting.  
  
Thousands of hunters had come to the dream. Some sought pale blood. some sought a refuge from disease, same as travelers Gascoigne had mistaken her for so long ago. Others yet, appeared there as though pulled by an incomprehensible force, without thought, without malice, without any sort of plan other than to torment and violate for the sake of it. Priyhnka knew, as soon as the terrified hunter first set an unsteady foot on the shifting sands of the hunter's dream that he was one such poor, accursed fool.  
  
The sight of the massive workshop seemed to set him ill at ease from the start, reasonable as he had probably just died for the first time, and it never seemed to stop.  When she sits outside in her wheelchair gazing upon the stretch of land where lush Yharnham grass suddenly gives way to island sand, he scowls swing his weapons at the locked little hut on the sand by the sea. Even as she is advising him, slowly and delicately though she would much rather shout, that it would be in his best interest to have himself a look at the chalice dungeons he still looks at the warm, wooden walls of her Workshop with something approaching distaste. Eventually his eyes come back to her.  
  
"Your big doll, Gascoigne, doesn't talk a lot. Is that normal?" he blurts out, tongue tripping over Gascoigne's name, sending vowels and syllables askew in his worry. "I asked him why he's wearing, you know, a huge coat on an island and he just stared at me. Did I not ask carefully enough? Did I-" Like a struck clam, he suddenly stops and presses his lips closed with a shifty look. Priyahnka's brow would be furrowed with agitation if she wasn't already so used to this.  Instead, she watches, stone-faced as he mutters in fearful whispers and scrambles down the workshop's stone steps.  
  
The clicks of his shoes on the steps becomes a soft crush of sand underfoot. She feels the dream wrap him up in mist and oblivion as he kneels at a headstone. She could let him languish there forever, trapped between planes, cursing his existence. It would probably get him out of her hair faster if she didn't, however. Sitting in her wheeled-chair, Priyahnka taps one solitary heel against the floor and sends the hunter on his way.  
  
"He is certainly a sad one," Djura remarks blithely. She didn't even even notice her fingers rubbing the shining scar on her temple until he spoke up.  
  
  
The first time she had pressed her leather clad fingertips into the crescent shaped gash she had been sitting, not that she could really do much else around here, in her inherited seat with her foot hanging over the edge of the dream in that place where the tide of clouds came in and out and turned into an endless sea of glowing waters. Behind her,a hunter moved around in a hurry; checking the storage box, buying and selling with the minuscule creatures that cohabited the dream, asking the doll of Gascoigne to channel blood for them. They knelt at the headstone for someplace called Cyprus Cross after the fourth trip to the storage box,sixth rune change, and third blood channeling. The dream plucked them from this plane. Well versed in the shifting nature of the dream by then, Priyahnka merely tapped one lonesome finger against her armrest and let the dream dissolve the industrious hunter completely, taking them away to where ever Cyprus Cross was.  
   
The sudden emptiness of the dream washed over her with bone chilling certainty. certainty that she would be there the rest of her life. Her hands clutched the armrests, nails digging into the wood like knives.  
  
Furiously she stood at the edge of the void, falling immediately, still unaccustomed to the loss of her foot. She thrashed as hard as she could with all of her limbs whirling through the air, and kicking sand into the ether. All at once the glowing on the void-clouds-sea dissipated, leaving only an ocean of haze. Priyahnka had almost fallen off the precipice when she felt Gascoigne's hand on her shoulder, steadying her.  
  
She turned back to look at him, calming under his impassive, glass gaze.  The frozen porcelain face suited him more than it had Maria's visage. She had always been expressive, Gascoigne had not. She could hear his joints clicking inside his gloves as he lifted her back into her seat, now more sandy than before. She nodded her thanks and he replied in kind before seemingly noticing something and wandering off.  
  
Alone again, but less so than before, she began brushing the sand off of her. It had gotten in every crevice and she was not having it. The brusque strokes of her hand traveled from clothes to arms to face. Her fingers brushed against Djura's scar. His dying moment, carved in the shape of the path his hand he held against her head took as he fell to his death with her knife in his chest.  
  
"Well then," Priyahnka hopped onto her single foot, weapon raised and ready to strike out of some long buried instinct. When she turned she was shocked into stillness to see Djura standing there so plainly, as if unaware of his death. "If this is what you meant by trusting, I'm not sure whether this is a breach of trust or not, my friend." She had tripped gracelessly on her way to embrace him, she had been alone there so long, just her and Gascoigne. He hadn't rejected her, just laughed as she pressed her palm against his chest to search for wounds.  
  
  
The Djura of the now stands behind her chair, staring out into the void. It feels like the gap between night and the dawn, when hunters of stronger persuasions had been grumbling and stuffing their things away in the workshop so that they may return to the life they led under the sun. It was in those moments, in the Before, that she and Djura and Emile and Gratia sat behind the workshop and chattered glibly until the workshop was free of others and they all had to leave before the sun's rise was completed. There is just Djura and herself now. Emile is long gone. Gratia gone before Emile. The Yharnham they knew is now just a dream of a workshop set on top of the memory of a house on the sand by the sea. Even with the two of them, they still talk.  
  
"I don't know if sad is the word." Priyahnka swirls her foot in the sand, recreating Caryll Runes from her memories and inventing new ones on the fly. "Maybe hopeless."  
  
"An apt description, to be sure." Djura leans, now, on the back of her chair. He stretches his neck over her shoulder to see what's she's created this time. She pushes his head back peevishly, as she always does. He laughs at having gotten a rise out of her, as he always does. She laughs too, just a little.  
  
"He is scared. We shouldn't be too harsh on him." Henryk says. He is just now opening the scrolling iron gates,crossing the thin divide between sand and soil. A few stray strands of flowers stick to his trousers, begging to go with him.  
  
"A bleeding heart as ever, Henryk." Djura tips his hat down, abashed at his own rudeness. Henryk had a point, to be afraid was natural. Even the beasts the hunters hunted had fear in them. That, Djura knew well.  
  
"Says the man who gave his heart away to beasts and stopped hunting." Henryk bumped his shoulder against Djura's in a not unfriendly manner. They had been comrades once upon a time, before Djura took up on that clock tower. Here, without any beasts to fight and their difference of opinion reduced to a mere thought excersize, that friendship showed. "In any case. That hunter is a peculiar one. I don't know what he's doing. Whatever it is, he may gravely injure himself trying to do it."  
  
"He'll just awaken here," Priyahnka reminds him with wry irony in her voice. "Like it was all a bad dream." Djura snorts, holding in a bitter laugh. "I wonder what he is doing. What is it that such a nervous man goes to do?"  
  
"Perhaps he's finding a new chalice. The odd types always seem to bring back the rare ones." Djura nodded his agreement silently, leaning back over Priyahka's shoulder to see what she's created this time. He's a bit surprised to see it's only a circle this time, but he memorizes the sight of it just in case. Who knows what she'll make of it.  
  
\----------------  
  
"I do wonder what, exactly, Nasim is doing out there."Djura sits in the chair near the desk, slouched ever so slightly, a carefully constructed casualness."Perhaps another gift for your Gascoigne?"  
  
Priyahnka had noticed when Gascoigne's garb became adorned with a very noticeable red brooch. She hadn't seen it since she had given it to Gascoigne's daughter, many lifetimes ago. Maybe the hunter was attempting to woo Gascoigne with it.  
  
It would not have been the first time a hunter had become enamored with Gascoigne. Some of them came back many times throughout the night to spend time with him. Others had held themselves in reserved silence, loving only with their eyes and never with words. Priyahnka didn't care overly much. She didn't want to marry Gascoigne, only see him happy.  
  
Even if it was a fragile,glass happiness for a doll, it was a happiness she could afford this Gascoigne. So she talked with him often, and remarked on the plethora of hunters that came through the dream. Fewer and fewer still were from Yharnham. Tales from hunters suggested that Yharnham was an ancient city now. It rested, long abandoned, in the annals of history. Many hunters that Dreamed were from foreign lands. Once or twice, a face she recognized had come through.  
  
The son of a goat herder she had seen in her travels was one such hunter. His mother had been fair and kind as she passed through. She had offered Priyahnka food and a place to stay as she slept. That night when bandits came to steal their goats and kill the family she had repaid the goat herder's kindness by sneaking up behind the men and murdering two of the three. The herder finished the third one herself, by beating him about the head with her crook.  
  
Priyahnka never caught the woman's name, but knew her face. Echoes of that face could be found in the young hunter what wielded a shepard's crook against the curious beasts he fought. She couldn't imagine what beasts would be felled by a simple tool for herding goats, but she was eager to learn. Her son was just as viscous as his mother when it came to battle if even a quarter of what he told her was true. She grew fond of him, giving him suggestions and knowledge of secret paths in the dungeons. She was almost dissapointed when his dawn came for him and she took his head as Gehrman had done to her and she cast his body into the sea, for him to awake into the real world.  
  
"You have to let them go sometime," Djura said as she pulled the corpse over the sand and into the sea of clouds.  
  
"I know that, Djura. It is not always easy." The stump of the neck turned the not-water red as she set the head on the sodden body. She knelt in the sand, folding his hands into a cradle for his head. She turned back to her spectators. "You are allowed to help." With nothing much else to do, Djura shrugged and sauntered over to assist.  
  
"While it is a sad affair for us," Henryk responded. "It is a better time for him, to be sure."  Henryk, who was not all there after having been killed in the middle of a break-down, was staring up into the sky. "Perhaps he will go on to live a fuller life with his wife than he would have had here."  
  
"I've had a fair time being dead," Djura pointed out for the sake of being contrary. "No hunting, good company. Never have to answer to anybody." Henryk did not take the bait. He remained staring at the endlessly bright moon. Djura turned back to Priyahnka and rolled his eyes. She shot him a sharp look, Djura hadn't had everyone ripped away from him like Henryk had.  
  
Djura still had an acquaintance and a lover alive when Priyahnka dragged him into death. Henryk had died believing the spirit of his old hunting partner and second wife was haunting him in vengeance for not protecting their shared best friend and he had probably seen Gascoigne's wife dead as well. Djura had a soft heart but Henryk's had been just as soft and he had never allowed himself to shy away from pain. It had consumed him before he met his death, holding on to her ankle.  
  
The three of them watched as the body floated away from the shore, dissolving into nothingness before it touched the horizon. How many hunters had come and gone like this? She found she could not answer.  
  
Nasim, the son of someone who had given her kindness passed out of the Dream and into the waking world here she would never see him again. It was happier for him she was sure; for her it was frustrating.  
  
With no further reason to sit in the sand she grabbed hold of Djura's arm and lifted herself back into her inherited chair. She rolled herself through the open gate and back up to steps of the Workshop where Gascoigne was sitting. She wasn't sure how he was sleeping, considering he was a doll, but there he was, snoring away. He was still sitting up as well. Priyahnka chuckled under her breath. Some things never changed.  
  
Bracing her leg against the stones, she slid her arms under the armrests and tilted herself forwards. Her palms hit the steps as the chair stayed on her back like a turtle shell. She climbed with a practiced quickness into the interior of the Workshop. With her inside, she twisted until the chair was mostly upright before grabbing the wall and levering herself up. Perhaps this is why Gehrman had the peg leg, so he could do without the hassle. Priyahnka was not a believer in it yet. Maybe in another decade of nights she would be, but for now she was as likely to have a peg leg as she was to be enshrined in one of those Cathedrals that Yharnamites liked so much.  
  
Priyahnka rolled herself over to the table. She could read "How To Pick Up Fair Maidens' again for a laugh. Henryk always flushed when she read it aloud and she and Djura would laugh themselves hoarse. Instead of the worn book she had expected a different book is open.  
  
It is brown and red with a gilt eye on the binding. When she holds it she knows it will fit into the circle of her arms like it was always meant to be there. It talks about her home and it talks about the stars and it talks about the mother, her mother, whose corpse was stolen from the sea. Nasim had seemingly been busier than the three of them knew, because part of the back pages have new text now. She can't read it, which angers her to no end but there is a wrapped parcel holding it open. The cloth comes off, she rubs one finger against the strange surface of it and she can feel herself dissolving in a way remembered from ages past.  
  
In Iosefka's clinic, in Central Yharnham when the sun has just begun to set. Priyahnka is born.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's only priyahnka's desire to keep people close to her that stops her from going mad like Gehrman. With those two souls tied to her as ghosts she manages to stay sane long enough to break out. Time for round three in Yharnham.


	9. The Before: Gascoigne

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gascoigne was not special

Horace Isidore Gascoigne wasn't a very special man by any means. His parents had raised him on a small farm, sending him herding geese to the market until the sudden shifts in power that seemed to be happening every month eventually drove them out of their home in Edstart. The ensuing flight out of the country landed them in Allemagne where he went from a youth to a young man, just a few years difference but an important distinction for someone of that age.  
  
The town they had landed in, too small to be called a town, really, but there was no concise way to say three farms and a single well, had nothing much going for it beyond the veil of safety from the rapidly shifting tides that were their fled home. The smell of heather and foreign wind which had initially delighted Horace had become stale to him over time. Worn with use as though it were an old blanket and just as unsatisfying to be in.  
  
 The others of his age had known each other their entire lives and the advent of a stranger among them wasn't well received. Doubly so at his foreignness, apart in his dark curling hair and skin that never tanned or changed but to burn however briefly. Horace had been no scholar at home in Edstart, but to learn the language of a new country was a stone in the jaw and it made his interactions with them even more obviously an interaction of those who belonged and the one who didn't. Even when he had the words right, he was mocked for the way the words came out, lilting and different and then cracking with the onset of growth. He became only more quiet as time continued trudging down its single minded path. Instead of words, which could be mocked and misunderstood, Horace let his eyes do the talking. And his fists, too, whenever the Liebstag boys decided to  attack him in that meaningless, restless way that they sometimes would. If not for the cats that hung around the house, Gascoigne would have had no company. It worried his parents. It worried him, too, but to admit it was anathema.  
  
Time passed, as it all too often does, and disaster, as it all too often does, struck without warning. Their house burned to the ground, taking all their belongings  with it, food included. His mother and father took care to shelter him from the flame as they escaped, but the burns they received were to sever and so, the fire took them as well. It is for all these reasons that The building of the Church in the next town over was a blessing in every conceivable way. The priest was amiable and also foreign, willing to welcome him to his parish with open arms.  
  
With no ties keeping Horace in Allemange he took up with the priest and became the Father Horace Gascoigne when his predecessor was kicked by an unruly horse and died. But this to, became stifling, like an outgrown coat and the days of his life that he had dedicated to the church wore thin, under the repeated touch of his examinations until the surface wore away to show the bones of a fearful desperation and regret. Such thoughts  preyed on him until he could no longer bear the thought of another year, another day anywhere near these fields and farms and the same people that had always been here, like cruel stone risen up from the ground.  
  
Horace took what belongings he could gather or any worth and left the chapel empty one morning, without any word to his parishioners who would later all agree that they all thought he was odd and a false priest the whole time but did not want to say anything about it. He didn't run though the night as though he were a thief or a man on the lam. He walked,slowly and silently, finally letting his body make him the wanderer his heart knew he was. He walked to the nearest dock and left the continent behind for the island, not knowing what he would find there, just that he would find something other than the life he had now and could no longer stomach.  
  
His priest's garb earned him a place on the boat and on the train. He can tell from the faces of the people he sees around him as he went ever on towards the biggest city he can find, that it will not work a third time. These people either do not care much for faith or never knew of it in the first place. It relaxes Gascoigne that he no longer has to tell them of any creed or search for parishioners. He had one large trunk and a half eaten loaf of bread to his name. He is free and it is exhilarating and terrifying. He closed his eyes, folded his hands, and let his thoughts run themselves in circles until the movement of the train lulled him to sleep.  
  
When the sharp whistle of the train shook the sleep from his eyes, he  rose to his feet in mild alarm. Having become just aware enough to notice that no one else had risen from their seats yet he was sorely tempted to sit back down and pretend that it had never happened. But no. there were eyes on him already and he couldn't sit back down without making it plain that he had been shocked awake. With a heart full of mortification and a resignation to never fitting in anywhere, he trudged to the nearest door, attempting to look like he knew what he was doing.  
  
The door leads to the junction between cars. He stands there in the sunlight, letting himself take in the smell of foreign air and freedom. it is bitter. The wind rushing past the safety of this little platform between cars carried the scent of something bitter and strangely familiar but unplacable. He tried not to let it bother him too much. Instead he looked out at the homes they passed as the train slowed to a stop. Great grey buildings, far more elaborate than anything he had seen in Allemange or Edstart, bracketed the train station on either side, like twin guardsmen. After a moment of consideration, he forewent going back into the train, instead deciding to step directly off of the platform and beeline to the cargo car. Ignoring the eyes on his tall, broad back he lifts the latch on the door and opens it wide.  
  
  
The bitter strangeness of the air is replaced by a different scent. Stranger, but more powerful, it supplants the air of the train and he cannot help but draw in a deep breath. Horace turns his head to follow the smell as he steps inside. It is then that he spots her in the darkened gloom of the train. Her skin is darker than he has ever seen before. He would have thought she was some sort of carved figure if it hadn't been for the obvious flurry of movement when she righted herself in the corner, right next to his trunk. Her hair was dark like her skin and her eyes shone wide like a feral cat that had no qualms attacking at the slightest provocation. It had been so long in  that tiny village where everyone was secure in their larders that the sight of a starving child was intensely wrong to his eyes.  
  
It would have been a lie to say that the fateful choice that decided the rest of his life was any type of choice at all. It was more of a reaction, the kind of instinctual movement that sent back an answering blow in a scuffle or flinch when about to be struck, that had Gascoigne reaching into his pocket and giving her his only piece of bread.  
  
She snatches the bread from his hand and scarfs it down, staring at him all the while with wary eyes. It makes him miss his cat. That cat had done the same thing when he first approached it with a bit of meat from the kitchen. The memory turns his lips up into a sad smile. That cat had loved him dearly, and he it. It followed him around as though it were its only hope in life to be around him.  
  
Fortune smiles on him twice, once with a cat, once with a girl. She follows him out of the train station, muttering in wonder under her breath. He cannot understand her nor she him, but neither of them can understand the mien of the people in this city and that singular idea is one around which they can find common ground and it is enough for now.  
  
By luck he finds someone named Lawrence that helps him find a house and settles in quickly, his self appointed charge beside him. It is a two roomed apartment with a stone fireplace and just enough space for the both of them. The girl, who he comes to know as Priyahnka, is intelligent for one of her age. Her strange skin and face and words cannot distract from the deliberate way she arranges her things in the space or the way she rearranges his. He sees sureness with a blade that shines through when he has the knife yanked from his hesitant hands and is shuffled away from the kitchen so that she can kill the chicken and cut the meat for dinner. He sees the blood on the coins she brings home sometimes and worries about what might be happening at her job digging graves that would bring fresh blood anywhere near her. He brings it up to her once and she brushes him off easily. There is no longer blood on her money after that but it does not reassure him any. Priyahnka grows stronger and happier and so does Horace.  
  
Priyahnka moves out when Viola begins expressing her interest in him. He assures her that she may stay in the house, whoever else may be there. He had seen her speak with Henryk, their landlord in feverish whispers at times as he turned corners in alleys, but he hadn't thought there was any real affection between her and a man almost ten years her senior. She insists that she had been longing to be married but was staying to make sure he was cared for. Priyahnka wished him well on his marriage and proceeded to visit him everyday regardless.  
  
And then Priyahnka dies in a midnight spray of blood, holding a weapon of indeterminate function in her slackening hands. The creature cuts through her neck  quickly, severing her head and the left side of her long braid. Horace Isidore Gascoigne stands there in the busy Yharnham night, ignorant of the smoke trailing up into the sky from Old Yharnham or the fact that the man racing to finish off the thing that killed her was Priyahnka's husband Henryk. He stands watching the blood pool around the cut hair on the stone street and recalls the heat of fire on his skin and the piteous moans of his parents as they succumbed to the burns the sustained, protecting him. He doesn't know if he's crying, only that he never wants to see something like this happen ever again.  
  
The announcement that happens tomorrow has been heard in every part of Yharnham by noon and it hits home that Horace and Viola will have no dark skinned visitor on their doorstep to chat with them today or ever again.  
  
Of course, he joins the hunt. His guilt crushes him day and night until he capitulates and wraps his finger around the handle of an axe. Viola worries and frets but cannot dissuade him. Priyahnka died protecting him and he cannot protect her now, but he will take up her fight to protect the city as she once did. Henryk teaches him, as Priyahnka is gone and her teacher as well. The years draw on and they grow to be good friends but he never forgets what set him hunting.  
  
He never forgets but the details become fuzzy over time. Hard edges wearing down until her face eludes him. Not just Priyahnka's face but that of his children, Erin and Daphne, and Viola. They all swirl and fall to ash in the moonlight. It's becoming harder and harder for him to remember, but he has to fight. He Has to. There is no other choice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If yhanrham is fantasy london, then Edstart is fantasy rural france. Allemange is the French word for Germany. Gascoigne family moves during the beginning of The Long 19th Century.  
> stone in the jaw-a pain in the ass/neck, something that makes what comes naturally suddenly very difficult (having a corporate executive visit your storeis a stone in the jaw)

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of this fic is based around a south Indian woman from Lakshadweep. I'm putting Bloodborne as happening in the werewolf cthulu-pocalypse version of 1800's London. That being said, please keep in mid that a lot of info is coming from wikipedia or various websites. if you see something incorrect please message me and i'll see what i can do.


End file.
